Confessions of a Street Addict [Paperback]

Cramer doesn't strike me as a charismatic guy. But you have to be impressed with where he started and where he ended up. Maybe his tactics were questionable. But to compete in the money arena with the fortunes at stake, it is impressive that he was able to even be on the field and favorably compete at least for a few years.

There are two significant relationships in the book I feel compelled to mention. First the investor who Cramer met who not only invested but recommended investors. This also turned out to be the relationship that Maier knew to get his job. A partnership was formed to set up TheStreet.com and somehow in the personnel problems of the venture, Cramer had a falling out with his favored investor that appeared to eventually leading to the shutdown of the hedge fund. You can sense from hearing Cramer's side that there is another side to the story. Cramer doesn't place blame but you can sense that he probably upset many people in his new business venture. It is an interesting case study listening to the different CEOs that are hired and how in Cramer's opinion they ruined the business.

Also, Cramer talks extensively about the relationship with his wife. She was also a stock trader and at different points in his career, she comes back to assist with trading. This part of the book shows just how emotional and psychological trading can be. Cramer would be a tough guy to live with and being married to another trader who understood the environment and the egos involved would make for a volatile relationship. I'd like to know more of the dynamics of that relationship but I suspect she is a real saint, as it appears to work well.

In summary, this book gives some background on what it is like in the rough and tumble world of Wall Street during a very unique trading period. Cramer is a self-promoter who successfully promoted himself into a high profile media job and therefore has some celebrity status. But the real story is the egos of people in this business and what they have to do to be successful and how they can live with some of their egotistical tendencies

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What makes this book so interesting is that it is neither a tearful apology nor a chest-thumping self congratulation. Cramer matter of factly details his journey to success as well as the toll it took on his personal life including his utter insensitivity in dealing with his family.

The passages dealing with His wife alone are worth the price of the book. The woman is nothing short of amazing both as the "Trading Goddess" that truly lives up to her name as well as the woman who puts up with a workaholic husband that is virtually never around when she needs him.

All in all, this is a fascinating book that anyone would do well to read.

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Cramer rips through his early life as a young Pennsylvania kid fascinated with stocks, zips through his years as an undergrad and burgeoning journalist at Harvard, shoots through his days as a rookie reporter at the L.A. Herald Examiner and his nights sleeping in a battered Ford Fairmont---and by page 14, we're already knee-deep in Cramer's passion, the stock market.

Cramer writes engagingly and keeps up a roaring pace, and reading his material is like being ensconced inside the guy's feverish, always calculating head. It's about as close as most will come to having a seat at a hedge-fund trading desk, and whether you're just interested in the Market or have years of experience, you'll find "Confessions" a tasty and addicting read.

The writing is amazingly candid, and the most refreshing thing about "Confessions", apart from the fact that it's rippingly good fun and fine writing, is Cramer's honesty. For all his bluster and arrogance, and for all his consumptive attention to outperforming the indexes and his rivals (and for better than 13 years, his hedge fund Cramer Berkowitz did just that) Cramer is willing to accept the lion's share of the blame here. Who threw bottled water and telephones at the heads of his henchmen on bad trading days? Who pancicked and wrote a capitulatory "get out NOW!" article on TheStreet.com on October 8th, 1998, just as the worst had occurred and the markets were beginning the roaring rally that would not end until 2000? Who, surprisingly, had abolutely no clue what was going on in the company he had poured his name and his money into, and didn't have any kind of feel for the circus of the coming IPO?

Cramer, Cramer, and Cramer. There are really three Jim Cramers in "Confessions": Cramer the trader, Cramer the stock-market commentator and journalist, and Cramer the dot-com businessman and New Economy darling. Guess which "Cramer" gets him in the most trouble?

But let's cut to the chase: "Confessions of a Street Addict" is loads of fun and a wild perch to look out on what has been a real revolution in the financial markets; Cramer's honesty, experience, wide-ranging connections and candor make this the funniest and most introspective book on Wall Street since Mike Lewis wrote "Liar's Poker"---and hey, Lewis even has a cameo role in "Confessions", in which he's credited with coming up with the name "TheStreet" for the company that became TheStreet.com.

That's just one character in a roster that looks like Who's Who of Wall Street, 1982-2003: Cramer meets up, socializes, trades and schemes with Robert Rubin, Roger Ailes, Joe "The Big Kahuna" Kernan, David "The Brain" Faber, and Mark Haynes.

He crosses swords with Barron's Alan Abelson and Money's Frank Lalli, and engages in the time-honored Wall Street passtime of making fun of the corrupt Dan Dorfmann. During his Harvard Law years, he works as a research grunt for high-powered defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, putting together briefs on the Klaus von Bulow case (and, apparently, played by "some Indian guy" in the movie "Reversal of Fortune"). He gets interviewed by Oliver Stone's research henchmen when he's a salesman at Goldman Sachs, and, according to Cramer, serves as Stone's inspiration for getting Buddy Fox in to meet Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street". He even opens his uber-restrictive hedge fund up for redemptions when a major client, Elliot Spitzer (then running for Attorney General of New York), asks to withdraw some funds to fuel his campaign, and suffers a nearly disastrous run on the fund that almost swamped him.

But the real attraction of "Confessions" is the way Cramer weaves his life and career into the seminal events that have defined modern Wall Street and moved us through a financial revolution, and we get a trench-level tour of the really seismic events: the 1987 Black Monday crash, buying into the 1991 Iraqi war, the implosion of Long Term Capital Management, the Asian Contagion and Russian collapse that nearly ended a 16-year old Bull Market, and the stock bubble that defined the twilight years of the "New" Economy.

Having read "Confessions", I thank God for a man like Jim Cramer: it shows me our hard-charging capitalist system is still working if it can produce a man like him. Cramer's chief virtue is that he says what's on his mind, an attribute, noble as it is, that got him in trouble in the SmartMoney event that he chronicles. In a way, Cramer is like Wall Street's answer to G. Gordon Liddy, a man who says and does what he pleases, and damn the torpedoes.

And Cramer is, was, and always will be a tireless and funny stock promoter, and his enthusiasm is infectious: if you aren't already gunning for equities and watching that ticker, you will be after you read this book---just be careful to take the lessons herein to heart.

"Confessions of a Street Addict" is a high-octane shot of raw adrenaline and compulsively addicting, and provides a 20 year ride inside the mind of a premier hedge fund manager---for that alone, it's worth the price of admission.

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