Confessions of a Street Addict

Everyone on Wall Street knows Jim Cramer, and Cramer knows Wall Street better than anyone. For fifteen years he ran Cramer, Berkowitz, one of the Street's most successful hedge funds with a compounded annual return of 24% after all fees. In Confessions of a Street Addict he takes us from his fascination with the stock market as a middle-class kid in the Philadelphia suburbs to Harvard, where he began managing money. After an apprenticeship at Goldman, Sachs, Cramer set out on his own with his wife, Karen, the "Trading Goddess," as his partner. Cramer brilliantly describes the life of a money manager -- the frenetic pace, the constant pressure to outperform the market and other fund managers, and the shark-like attacks fund managers make as they circle a fund perceived to be in trouble.

At the same time that he was managing money, Cramer was one of the best-known commentators on the financial markets. A former president of the Harvard Crimson, Cramer had been a newspaper reporter before he began managing money. While he was a fund manager, he wrote for SmartMoney and other publications, making him one of the first money managers to offer insight and analysis from inside the world of finance. With the rise of the Internet and online publishing, he co-founded TheStreet.com, the online financial Web site. In one of the most fascinating chapters in this book, Cramer takes us inside the IPO of TheStreet.com, where he found himself a knowledgeable but helpless onlooker as his own Web site came on the market at an unrealistically high price that it never reached again, a harbinger of the dot-com disasters that would soon haunt the stock market.

Throughout the book Cramer is characteristically outspoken, outrageous, and candid about everyone, himself included. There has never been a high-wired, high-octane book about Wall Street like this one.