Confessions of A Street Addict

James J. Cramer

James J. Cramer (Cramer & Berkowitz, TheStreet.com, CNBC’s Kudlow & Cramer) takes you to a stock market trader’s hell and back in “Confessions of a Street Addict.” The analogy of investing being a war zone was coined at least 70 years ago with Gerald Loeb’s “The Battle For Investment Survival” (1935). And you can’t make it through the pages of this book without realizing what a battlefield it is. No book comes closer to approximating the giddy highs or heart-wrenching lows that trading puts a person through. The glory of victory, the agony of defeat, are never more real as Cramer bares the trader’s soul.

The book reads almost like an adventure novel – ricocheting from one crisis to another, each scene set up with hero and villain, with Cramer not always coming out on top.  He starts you off with his basic biography, of being a teenage stock picker (paper trader), of his march through journalism (which shows in his writing), of Harvard Law, and eventually to Wall Street’s most intense stage of conflict – the hedge fund.

The beauty of this book is that you get the fly-in-the-brain’s view of how traders think (or don’t think when their emotions get the best of them), how Wall Street really works, and how it all congeals together to produce the daily statistics. You are there as Cramer learns the ropes from his wife-to-be, The Trading Goddess, Karen Backfish. You sweat with him as he does deals, takes chances, high-fives victories, and crashes so low with failures he could probably seep out under the door unnoticed. A lot of the things you learn runs counter to what the official Wall Street line wants you to know – the inside story of the blow-up of LTCM, and how analysts, brokers, and fund managers continually jostle each other for positions of power and influence, and profit.

The most interesting part of the book is being there as the Internet springs to life in the mid 90s – the wild enthusiasm and the unbelievable cluelessness that much of the Internet was built upon. But it was built, and it was built by the types of people Cramer came in contact with regularly - half geniuses, half dreamers, and half con men.  And you’re right - most of the time, it didn’t add up.

Cramer, in addition to being a market manic, had a populist’s belief that the little guys should have the same access to what the big guys had, and that the technology was now here to make it possible. TheStreet.com was the result. It’s still here – one of the survivors, as is Cramer.

A lot of the book is a sad commentary on how far an addiction can muscle your life around. Cramer chastises himself for talking stocks beside his mother’s deathbed, his tumultuous relationship with his benefactor Marty Peretz, the destruction of computers and equipment and abuse of employees when the market went against him, and how he deserted his family for the sake of “the game.” He simply couldn’t stand to lose. In the end, he had enough common sense (though he makes it clear that his wife was always the steady rock in their relationship) to quit while he was ahead.

I particularly enjoyed Cramer’s honesty at the extremes, (the emotional soul-wrenching limit) especially the bottom in 1998 (when he caved in - “sell everything, the market’s gonna’ crash – it’s the end of the world”), and at the top in 2000 (when he publicly announced Internet stocks would live forever), and Cramer’s final tantrum with the market on 22 Nov 00 when he met his match in a long Brocade position (I quit!). Each time, Cramer was so sure he was right, nobody or thing could dissuade him of his fallibility. But each time, it was his wife (1998), or reality (2000), or, finally, his own cathartic understanding of himself that led him back to humility…and humanity.

Given his personality, one must believe that if he had taken up stamp collecting, little would have changed, and it would be the philatelic world which would have had to live through Cramer’s manias. Summing up his career, Cramer quotes his wife’s 1998 pronouncement as they recovered from nearly panicking out at the bottom: “It’s better to be lucky than to be good.” However, with the success Backfish and Cramer had, I expect their luck was more of the variety of being smart enough to be at the right place at the right time than that of a pure roll of the dice. Good traders aren’t just lucky, they’re good. And Cramer was good, even if he was an addict.