Customer Reviews

Jim Cramer's Getting Back to Even (An Abridged Production)[5-CD Set] (Audio CD/Audio Book)

5 star:		(53)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

First a caveat, Jim Cramer seriously annoys me. I rarely ever watch his show (especially after the notorious "melt-down") and less frequently read his books. However, as a college instructor and business writer, I read a lot of business books and make a point of keeping up with what is in the popular press since it tends to come up in daily questions etc...admittedly, I was also curious how well a book claiming to help people "Get back to Even" was going to do in the ratings...it's certainly a modest proposal at best and a constant reminder of financial pain at worst. Much to my surprise, Cramer actually mentions this early in the text so score one for Cramer!

The book is easy to read with a purely conversational tone; those that enjoy Cramer will feel right at home while those such as myself will still manage to get through it without constant irritation like listening to him on television. There is an abundant use of examples to explain any all all technical terms no matter how simple or complex but they do not (usually) insult the readers intelligence but rather enhance the reading nicely. The author assumes the reader has minimal prior exposure and takes little for granted so even novice investors or those that have always had their portfolio managed by someone other than themselves will not need to read with references in hand.

Now, as to the core of the concepts covered in the book itself. Cramer begins by presenting 8 new rules which are more or less "common sense" but well worth repeating given the typical lack of financial savvy of most "investors". I suspect most people will enjoy the statistics and rationale more than the actual "rules" themselves but it effective presents a foundation from which the rest of the book is written while acting as the typical disclaimer for all financial related books (ie, get your basics covered first).

Like any investment related book, there are likely areas to agree and disagree with...but if one manages to pick up a few nuggets it is well worth the time and effort to read. This book is no exception. Cramer is Pro diversification, gold/precious metals, dividends, performing your own research and weekly updates for stocks that you select. He goes into more detail than usual in how to research these stocks, his rationale for selection criteria and examples from both sucessful and non-successful examples in his own past.

For those that are well versed in reading/understanding financial statements, most of this will be rudimentary but as a person that routinely deals with people in various stages of financial literacy - there is a strong need for user-friendly information that can be applied directly to one's own portfolio. Cramer earns an "A"...he keeps the information direct, relevant and easy to understand while covering the flaws and limitations of everything from valuation to growth rates and the impact of "big money".

After a fairly robust section on dividends (like a dividends 101 abbreviated course), Cramer goes on to name 12 stocks to watcch for the recovery including a few well placed plus for his show and newsletter. As a general rule, I despise books that are thinly veiled marketing materials but in this case, didn't dock a point from the review because he showed quite a bit of self restraint and kept it to a minimum. Each recommendation is supported by a full rational including areas serviced, history, future potential etc as would be expected. Whether you agree or not, each is well worth the time for consideration and/or to use as a foundation for your own selections.

Bottom line - worth the time and effort to read. Novice investors will appreciate the examples and conversational style, more experienced investors will appreciate the actual stock selections with rational behind each even if you disagree. I suspect one of the largest complaints will be on what is NOT included in this book as well as the typical (and expected) diagreement surrounding Cramer's general investment advice...of course, readers should not expect a radical departure and will get what is expected in terms of Cramer's general investment orientation, style etc...

For prospective purchasers, hopefully you read the reviews to items before you buy them. In the case of this book, Getting Back to Even, I want you all to know that you can safely ignore the vague, uninformative, and unhelpful reviews left by some members (who probably haven't even read the book). You should not be purchasing this book unless you know something about the author, Jim Cramer. He has a daily show here in the US, every week day at 6PM EST on CNBC where he discusses stocks and their companies. If you have aren't familiar with Mr. Cramer, don't buy this book. Buy his earlier books. Though they are not cataloged or described as a series, the different books focus on different aspects of investing. They all provide general investing information, but it loosely breaks down like this (I am not listing all of his books, just the ones I've read):

Real Money: One of his earlier books, it explains his methodology in an overview fashion. This is where I would recommend starting.

Mad Money: This book follows Real Money and goes into more detail on many aspects of Real Money, such as his prescribed homework for your stock picks.

Stay Mad for Life: This book focuses more on investing for retirement, so it's not as suited to younger folks such as myself (25/male). But it is still a great guide with a ton of great information on preparing yourself for retirement at almost any age.. except perhaps if you're already retired!

Getting Back to Even: Despite what some of the sensibility-impaired critics have implied or outright accused, Cramer never suggests that he is infallible, nor does he ever give you the illusion that if you do what he tells you that you will never lose money. He always makes it clear that investing in stocks, especially speculative stocks, has inherent risk attached to it and that no matter how good you are, you WILL lose money. The goal of his books is to help teach you how to minimize your losses and maximize your gains, with the only limit being the amount of effort you are willing or able to put into the process. Getting Back to Even is for helping those whose portfolios have been hit hard by the global recession. Again, this isn't the right book to purchase as a starting point; read his earlier books first.

And just for the record, if all you did was listen to Cramer recommend a stock on his show, Mad Money, and then went and bought the stock without doing the homework he RELIGIOUSLY instructs you to do, you deserved to lose your money because you ignored EVERYTHING he has told you to do to make money. Mad Money, the show, is not a stock-picking show. He doesn't just say the name of stocks he likes. He tells you WHY these stocks are good, in his professional opinion. He helps you with your research but he is NOT a substitute for it. Don't attack him because you were too lazy or impatient to do it properly. All he teaches you is to basically learn as much as humanly possible about the stocks you own or want to own-- how can that possibly be a "scam"?

I liked this book better than some of Cramer's past books on amateur investing and trading. The first few chapters provide a long-winded explanation of how economic recovery inevitably follows recessions, and Cramer explains how he learned lessons from past market declines. He also repeats his past message of 'buy and homework,' meaning that buying a stock requires a commitment of an hour a week of reading about the company, economic outlook and industry trends. He again cites the virtues of diversification.

This book may only have a shelf life of four or five months to take advantage of his recommendations, but he tells readers to put money into cyclical stocks that will snap back in the early stages of a recovery, such as Caterpillar, J.P. Morgan, Visa and Hewlett-Packard, among others. He provides a short list of regional banks that he says have strong balance sheets and will be well positioned to take over weaker financial firms. The chapters on options are somewhat oversimplified. He basically recommends buying deep-in-the-money calls on stocks you think will rise in the near future--of course, finding those stocks is the biggest challenge for any amateur investor.

Some of the best advice I ever got from any investment books is knowing when to sell, which often divides winning traders from losers. For that, I would recommend the book "What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars." It's an autobiographical account of a Chicago futures trader who discovered that he never was a real trader, only a buyer of long positions that happened to make money during a bull market.

I admit I love his show but the real reason I give this book 5 stars is for the Options chapter. Every option site I have viewed made it seem so complicated, which it can be, but buying call options is as easy as it gets and for me so far very profitable.

Since I usually find myself buying puts on the stocks that Jim Cramer reccomends and have occassionally made large sums on it (Inuitive Surgical anyone, the I in his CANDIES made me 20,000 thousand dollars when it collapsed from 350 to 308 dollars, and I had puts for 330) I can't really reccomend his show. But, nonetheless, doing your homework, studying the stocks, and giving Jim Cramer a listen can be interesting and helpful. His books were the first thing I read because he was the only personality I knew about that had to do with the stock market, and I learned a lot of stuff.

This book has a lot of good information that can probably help you get back to even and even start to get ahead, but I don't feel the book completely stands alone, I feel that without having read Watch T.V and Get Rich, Stay Mad, and Real Money, I wouldn't have gotten as much out of the book as I did, and wouldn't have felt so good about it. That is why I don't know how to feel about this book.

I'm not sure if it stands on its own. Reading through many of the reviews, I wonder how many people have gone through all of his other books. But that's really my only concern.

This book is full of information, including some picks to look at. The information he gives you is solid, including a good strategy of buying deep in the money calls. Options are the often overlooked strategy of the investor, but can be a great aide for the individual to speculate with a little money, or to hedge a bet against volatility.

Jim Cramer brings all his usual energy into this book and comes up with a streatgy that can realistically help you get back to even and get ahead in this new environment of chaotic confusion. This book is a refreshing, realistic calm--Cramer Calm--approach that can help people start organizing their portfolios and start getting back what they lost.

Because of that, I reccomend the book wholeheartedly, especially for people who are already familiar with Jim Cramer's books.

I would buy this book regardless of what your personal opinion is of Jim Cramer. My investing and stock trading style is very different from his but I agree with him on most points in this book. In this book Cramer focuses on many risk adjusted strategies that over time will bring your portfolios back to even, if you are down the 30-50% like most investors are in the past two years. (I am a trend follower and did my homework on the fundamentals so I went to cash on January 4th, 2008). I completely agree with Cramer's advice to never buy and hold, but buy and homework. I know this is true from personal experience. Cramer also points out that if your investments drop by 50% you must have a 100% return to get back to even. If $100,000 drops by 50% to $50,000 it has to go back up 100% to get back to $100,000. This is sobering, however I would also like to point out that a compounded 12% return six times is a 100% return, this is certainly possible and this book will show you many ways to accomplish this.

1). Jim suggests buying great stocks at good prices, he advises not to chase stocks but wait for pullbacks to buy what you want at the right price. never chase a stock when it goes beyond a reasonable price. (This also explains why he loves certain stocks then a week later does not, the stock became to expensive).

2). He gives great strategies on how to use the right dividend stocks to get steady low tax returns. Dividend stocks hold value better than other stocks in huge sell offs. He shows how to choose the ones with strong steady earnings to get the ones that are accidentally high yielders and avoid the ones about to cut their dividends due to declining earnings.

3). He gives you twelve specific stocks that he believes will benefit greatly when the full economic recovery takes place. They are all very strong companies in different sectors: construction, financial, industrial, housing, and oil, etc.

4). He suggests investing in companies that will benefit from the growing world of wireless internet. He believes that the growth in this industry will be a growth story of epic proportions.

5). He gives names of regional banks with strong balance sheets, and good loan practices, that are poised for growth through takeovers and better management. Cramer has seen this before in the savings and loan disaster and recovery of the early 90's.

6). For the first time in one of his books Jim Cramer explains how to use deep in the money call options intelligently for low risk returns.

7). He urges us not to become perma-bears and miss the recovery. Things will recover and we must be invested to take advantage of it when it arrives.

The book ends with twenty-five new rules for post-apocalyptic trading. Which gives some great advice including how to use secondary stock offerings to make money by buying in at the right time. Also, how to choose the right IPO to buy based on who is taking it public. At the end of the book he rails against the dangers of double and triple leverages ETFs, showing how they have daily returns that in the long term do not mirror the index it is reflecting. You can be short a double leverged financial ETF and still not make money after the financial sector crashes for two months due to volatility and daily rebalancing. They are strictly for day traders.(I agree, and I have done very well day trading them, but they are also sometimes great for trend following for days and sometimes weeks).

I really enjoyed this book more than I thought I would and learned several things to help me in my investing and trading. I highly recommend it for anyone starting on the road to get you portfolio back to even or just get great returns from being a more informed investor.

Cramer's new book can basically be broken down into into five sections: commentary about the financial meltdown and moral support that you can come back, high yielding dividend stocks to buy, two ways to use options to increase gains, commentary on how to mentally approach your comeback, and 25 rules you should follow. The section on how to use options is by far the best section and most novel for a Cramer book, its not something you would see on his show. But almost everything else has been presented in more depth at one time or multiple times on his show, so for me the book was pretty much a waste of money. Finally, it gets to be annoying that on subjects where he skimps on info he goes on to mention that if you want to learn more there are several subcription services at [...] that you sign up for to become a better investor. Falls far short of Real Money and Street Addict.

This book is a practical resource for getting an understanding of working with equities and includes principles that will outlive the specific picks suggested in the book. Great foundation for Jim Cramer's show MadMoney, which I also find very useful.

I really like the book. Thanks Jim Cramer for the investment insight again.

1. One thing what Jim talks about is how the mutual fund play in the stock market.
2. This is important you need to buy stocks when the market is in a uptrend and a stock which is hitting the 52 weeks high is going to go higher.
3. Also investment is about gaining knowledge.
4. One other important lesson in investment is how and when to sell your stocks.
5. The most important rule as I learned from William O Neil or IBD ( Investors Business Daily) is sell a stock when it goes below 8% of your purchase price.
6. If one had followed this rule people would have conserved their hard earned capital in 2001 and 2008.
7. Jim covers in details about Visa and Apple, two powerful stocks for the next 5 years atleast.
8. Its true what he has stated stocks have produced the best return if we go back to last 8 decades.
9. But in investment one needs discipline, understanding, patience, when to buy, when to sell.

Lastly I would encourage retail investors to do their own research and homework. For that along with Jim Cramer one should be a a serious reader of
Investors Business Daily. In fact even Jim reads it. If you look at his recent shows he talks about arcsight, Salesforce, Apple, Visa , Flir systems they
are all covered in detail in IBD. One place where Jim lost out this year in 2009 was in Chinese stocks. He kept talking about Chinese ETFs whereas the
reality was when the uptrend started in March 2009, it was led by Chinese stocks like SNDA, NTES, PWRD, BIDU, ASIA, RINO. They were extensively covered in IBD.
To be a successful retail one needs to be diversified in their research as well. So combine IBD with Jim's books and also the book of Jesse Livermore,
Gerald O Loeb, Nicholas Darvis and one will be a winner in the long run.

Investment is a long term process of learning. Good luck and best wishes.

I would get this for my tablet if it wasn't almost 2x as much as the hardcover version. As someone who remembers when Cramer was using internet message boards as the basis for his stock picks, I take his advice with a grain of salt. Still, this book seems to fit some spare time I have right now.