Confessions of a Street Addict

Confessions of a Street Addict
by James J. Cramer

Confessions of a Street Addict
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Book Summary Information

Author: James J. Cramer
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-06-03
ISBN: 0743224884
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Book Reviews of Confessions of a Street Addict

Book Review: A Classic
Summary: 5 Stars

This is a great book, difficult to put down. I think it will eventually become an investment classic.

This book is actually five books in one. First, there is the development of James Cramer until middle age and insights into his partners, especially his wife, Karen. Second, it is an investment book. Third, it is about running a successful hedge fund. Fourth, it is a book about setting up and floating a dotcom company. Fifth, it is about the financial media.

In the book, Cramer is brutally forward about how he sees himself. Highly competitive, putting himself on the line, manically temperemental, can keep a grudge, a persons of strong likes and dislikes, benign break-and-bangs, but, I think, basically a great fellow deep down. Sometimes he is naive, or comes across as being so, sometimes naive on purpose, sometimes inadvertenly, as part of his nature. Cramer in the book is a fascinating study: the boy enraptured by stocks even before knowing what they are - like I was with scrapped copies of the FT - the young man who liked to write, the born journalist who "wanted to tell the world" what he had discovered, an impulse which is often misunderstood or even sneered at but one which is essential to progress because it makes the world revert to the mean.

His descriptions of his wife, Karen, her coolness, no-nonsense and clarity of vision, is superb, worth the book on its own. At the fund's critical moment in 1998, she had the nerve to take the ultimate risk, or else...

It is a book about investing - a sort of contrarian style, with a month to a quarter time frame, plugged into the info stream.... There are numerous examples of how he traded his stocks, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Even if it is not your style, as it is not mine, you'd still get a lot of insight on other people's decision making.

In running the hedge fund, his consistent success sharpened his competitive manic pursuit of performance, in other circumstance, a perfectly virtuous cyle. In Cramer, this all-encompassing urge came against Lady Market, flirtatious and capricious in the extreme, and it came against Cramer's inbuilt inability to accept losses as part of the game. He wanted perfection, only winning trades. You can see the crescendo coming....

The book is also a very revealing case study of the IPO process. I never read a better description, perhaps not even in any one novel albeit under the cover of fiction.

Throughout the book we get to meet the news and financial media, the ambition which drives it forwards and the great constraints it faces. Cramer, of course, is one of the most innovative media persons.

This book book is a great read : great stories, great characters, two great careers in one, mostly honest (sometimes skirting the lawn), fast moving.



Summary of Confessions of a Street Addict

Everyone on Wall Street knows Jim Cramer, and Cramer knows Wall Street better than anyone. In the most candid and outrageous look at Wall Street since Liar's Poker, Cramer, co-founder of TheStreet.com, radio and television commentator, and for years a premier money manager, takes readers on the wild ride that is Wall Street -- revealing how the game is played, who breaks the rules, and who gets hurt.

Confessions of a Street Addict takes us from Cramer's roots in the middle-class Philadelphia suburbs to Harvard, where he began managing money, and then to Goldman Sachs, where he went into business with his wife -- Karen, the "Trading Goddess" -- as his partner. He brilliantly describes the life of a money manager: the frenetic pace, the constant pressure to outperform the market and other fund managers, and the sharklike attacks fund managers make as they circle a fund perceived to be in trouble.

Throughout the book Cramer is characteristically outspoken, offering his hard-won insights about the market and everyone in it, himself included. There has never been a more eloquent market insider than Cramer, nor a more high-octane book about Wall Street.


It's hard to think of anyone more intense or opinionated, or who wears as many hats as James Cramer. In Confessions of a Street Addict, the man who first made a name for himself on Wall Street successfully managing his hedge fund--and then became famous on Main Street with his manic appearances on CNBC--tells the improbable story of his career as journalist, Wall Street pundit, Internet entrepreneur, and television commentator. For the most part, Cramer manages to avoid the self-congratulatory hype that mars so many books of this ilk; in fact, what makes Confessions so compelling are the shots that Cramer takes at himself, be it his now infamous capitulation during the stock market panic of October 1998, when he wrote a piece for TheStreet.com advising readers of an impending crash just as the market began to rebound, or the callous way he treated so many around him in pursuit of the next trade. Here's an informative, honest, and rollicking read for fans of CNBC, TheStreet.com, or anyone who has ever lost sleep thinking about their portfolios. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards

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