Meet CNBC's Mad Money Man
"You just knew he was going to outrun them all," Brill recalls. "If there was a bad snowstorm, he'd tell you McDonald's stock was going to go down because it would ruin the potato crop and increase the cost of making their french fries."
Cramer's exploits over the next 14 years are as notorious as they are legendary. Flanked by his wife, Karen, a fellow trader whom he came to call his "Trading Goddess" for insisting that he liquidate his positions right before the market crashed in 1987, he barked out orders to underlings and subjected those who failed to follow through to boot-camp-style humiliations. He hurled office chairs and water bottles, smashed computer monitors, and slapped Post-it notes emblazoned with stock symbols on the foreheads of those who made stupid trades.
Going online. They nonetheless helped him rack up an impressive 24 percent average annual return that netted him tens of millions a year. All the while, he kept his hand in journalism, writing personal finance columns and teaming with Peretz to launch TheStreet.com, one of the first online publications to track the stock market.
Yet his personal life was beginning to spin out of control. Between stock market gyrations and the turmoil of launching TheStreet.com, he was a frequent no-show at family events and says he once dragged his girls away from a vacation in the Florida Keys so he could make a three-minute TV appearance on Good Morning America.
"Oh, God, shoot me for that," he now says of the incident.
Determined to make it up to his family, he went cold turkey in 2000, quitting his hedge fund and signing up to coach his daughter's soccer team.
"You aren't going to sit on that couch in the living room and watch the cnbc ticker all day, are you?" his autobiography recalls his wife asking when he told her he'd quit.
"Nope," he responded. "I am done trading."
Maybe so. But Cramer continues not only to eyeball the ticker but to move it as well. The "Cramer effect," as it's known, can lift a stock's shares 15 percent or more in the days following his "buy" calls. His daily picks—often a dozen or more suggested both in scripted segments and in a 10-minute "Lightning Round" that answers viewers' calls on the fly—receive close scrutiny.
Take his recent "buy" recommendation on Syneron Medical, maker of a new line of dental laser drills. His sleeves rolled up to his elbows as the Steadicam operator pulls in for a close-up, Cramer mugs a teeth-gnashing grimace, then grabs his electric drill and drives the bit into the mouth of a balding bobblehead doll made in his image.
"Symbol E! L! O! S!" he calls out like a cheerleader. "EEEEEELOS!"
"Oh, we liked it once. We actually hit it out of the park!" he yells, grabbing a baseball bat and beheading the doll with one swing. "And now I think it's time to nail elos again!"
Over the next 10 minutes he lays out the case for why Syneron's dental lasers are the next big thing. And sure enough, by the end of the next day, the company's share price has risen more than 17 percent on unusually high volume—despite no news other than Cramer's pick.
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