WASHINGTON, June 4 (UPI) -- This spring, two tell-all books were released exposing the inner working of the Wall Street hedge fund Cramer Berkowitz and its mercurial senior partner James J. Cramer.
Both books portray Cramer as an insufferable workaholic control freak, who browbeats subordinates for poor stock picks and destroys office equipment when his own picks go south. These revelations will come as little surprise to anyone who has seen the outspoken Cramer on CNBC's Squawk Box or Kudlow & Cramer, or listens to his national radio program Real Money.
What will come as a surprise is that while a disgruntled former employee wrote one of the books, the other book was written by Cramer himself.
In "Confessions of a Street Addict" (Simon & Schuster, 2002, 320 pgs, $26.00,) Cramer describes how a middle-class kid from Philadelphia, fascinated by the stock market from an early age, became a high-flying equities trader in the 1980s. With a slight detour through journalism and law school, Cramer is eventually drawn back into his first and true love -- Wall Street.
Former employee Nicholas Maier is hard pressed to paint a more unflattering portrait of Cramer in his re-released book "Trading with the Enemy: Seduction and Betrayal on Jim Cramer's Wall Street." (The publisher had to pulp 4,000 books from the first printing after Cramer's lawyers complained about false claims of insider trading. HarperCollins also sent a retraction to bookstores that had already received the book.)
While containing too much score settling and trash-talk directed at those who have done him wrong over the years to be considered a true "confession," Cramer holds little back in his criticisms of his favorite subject -- himself. In a recent New York Magazine column, Cramer reflected, "In my twenty years of stock trading, I morphed from someone who was a decent hardworking guy interested in lots of different things into a virtual cartoon character of out performance, who couldn't see what else there was in life besides winning, finishing first, beating everyone else at the game."
While some may argue with his "before" description of himself as a "decent hardworking guy" -- his cutthroat style of both investing and writing led Cramer to create as many enemies as he did money for his investors -- no one can deny that by the time he quit Cramer Berkowitz in late 2000 he was a single-minded trading machine who would let nothing and no one interfere with his goal of outperforming his competitors. His family suffered the most -- whether it was discussing expiring call positions with a big client the day his mother died or fielding a phone call from the office while he was with his wife in the delivery room -- and by the end of the book his wife cancels his tickets to a family vacation.
Whatever one's opinion is of Cramer -- he is a man who people either love or hate (and with great intensity, at that) -- his workload was staggering. While managing an investment portfolio of upwards of $300 million, he also wrote columns and contributed to magazines (Time, GQ, New Republic, New York Times Magazine, and SmartMoney) as well as television (Good Morning America, Politically Incorrect, CNBC's Squawk Box, and the short-lived Fox program TheStreet.com). Even this level of media saturation wasn't enough for Cramer, so in 1996, he and Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, decide to create a website devoted to financial news and analysis.
It is the formation of TheStreet.com that makes up the meat of "Confessions" and provides some of the most interesting reading. More than just another story of a once high-flying Internet stock that crashed back down to earth, the creation of TheStreet.com reads as a textbook case of how not to form (and run) a business. Unable to find an established media outlet that would give them part ownership in the enterprise, Cramer and Peretz decide to found TheStreet.com themselves. Before they know it, the operation is hemorrhaging money, the founders have lost any semblance of operational control and a succession of managers have been hired and fired as they nearly run the company into the ground. Cramer is particularly contrite about his betrayal of Peretz in a dispute with TheStreet.com's first editor in chief, Ravi Desai. An action that nearly cost the partners' friendship and -- when Desai's mismanagement spins out of control -- the company.
"Confessions" is an entertaining, if disconcerting, tour of the back rooms of Wall Street, and describes activities that so narrowly skirt the letter and the spirit of insider trading laws so as to give individual investors pause. A wild ride of fortunes made and lost, Cramer's prose at times becomes labored. His use of inappropriate metaphors border on comical, as references to "invisible claymore mines" and "making a bed of Kingsfords" are joined by this clumsy phrase: "But like home run hitters in a shortened season, these fellows were now mere asterisks in the history of the business."
Whether Cramer has been "cured" of his addiction, only time will tell. However, his brash pronouncements and near constant presence in Wall Street media circles are certain to keep generating hard feelings among his peers and those he criticizes. Until his redemption is assured, he should expect his former enemies to offer little quarter. At one point in "Confessions" Cramer mentions that he skipped buying a book from Amazon.com because "We were short Amazon. I didn't ever patronize something we were short, on principle, until we covered and went long." In a move that has a faint hint of payback, Amazon has bundled Cramer and Maier's books together.
(Thomas Timmons is an Arlington, Va.-based freelance writer.)
