Making money takes a little homework

Stock-market guru Jim Cramer has made millions over the course of his career as a hedge-fund manager and Wall Street commentator. But during that same career he also lost millions, and learned exactly what he did wrong in those situations. In his second book, “Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World,” Cramer details just how he made his money and the guiding principles he uses — including doing plenty of homework. Here's an excerpt.

Chapter One: Staying in the Game
If you look through my wallet, you will find all the things that everyone carries: license, credit cards, pictures of my wife and kids, and some cash. But if you look deeper, in some of the crannies, you'll find two things no one else has: my first pay stub, a tattered, faded beauty from the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper from September 1977, and a snippet of a portfolio run from the lowest day of my life, October 8, 1998.

I keep these talismans with me wherever I go, because they remind me why I got into stocks and why I had to stay in stocks no matter what, because the opportunities are too great not to be in them. The $178.82 I made that first week as a general assignment reporter in Tallahassee serves as a reminder to me that a paycheck is almost never enough to make a decent living on and to save up for the necessities of later life. That torn and bedraggled stub, with its $30 in overtime and oversized take by the federal government, keeps me honest and reminds me where I am from, how I never want to go back there, and how hard work at your job isn't enough to make you rich. You have to invest to make that happen. If you invest well you should almost always be beating the return you get on your day job.

The other smudged rectangle of paper in my wallet, the one that obscures the right-hand corner of my wife's picture, bears a series of cryptic numbers: 190,259,865; 281,175,544; and 90,915,674. The last number has a big black minus sign right after it. That's a cutout from my daily portfolio run on the most disastrous day my hedge fund ever had, October 8, 1998, a day when I was down $90,915,674 — that's right, more than $90 million on the $281 million that I was supposed to be managing. I had "lost" almost half the money under my management in a series of bets in the stock market that hadn't yet paid off, to put a positive spin on an unmitigated decline. At that moment, everyone — my investors, my employees, the press, the public — everyone had written me off, except for my wife, whom I had worked with for so many years and who knew never to count me out. "You've had it, Cramer, you are gone," the collective brokerage chorus told me.

Not two months before I had been on the cover of Money magazine as the greatest trader of the era. Now I was wondering whether I could survive the year. With just two months left, I had to find a way at least to make back that $90 million if I wanted to stay in a business that I had thought I was born for. Most hedge funds don't come back from those kinds of titanic losses.

Using the very same techniques and tactics I will describe here, I methodically made back all of the money I had lost to date that year, and by December I had returned to a slim profit for the year. I finished up 2 percent, a $110 million comeback in less than three months. I averaged $1.4 million in profits every single day. Yet I still waived my management fee of $2 million because I didn't think I deserved a penny, given how I had almost broken the bank. I still don't think I deserve to get paid for a comeback, because I dug my own hole by not following my disciplines and my rules, by succumbing to a lack of diversification and to inflexibility, those two assassins of capital.

That snapshot of how close I came to failure reminds me how important it is to stay investing and trading stocks no matter what because they are just too lucrative to stay away from for any long period of time. It also serves to remind me of how humbling this business is and how important it is to adjust course, for I had been sloppy and blind to a changing market during that catastrophic year. Had I not been flexible and willing to change strategies, I would never have come back.

In the very next year after my near-cataclysmic debacle, I made more than $100 million. The following year I made $150 million, again using the same rules and techniques I will describe here. I had plenty of help in the $100 million year: the market was terrific, easy, almost straight up. But in 2000, the biggest year, the $150 million year, the market peaked and crashed, yet I still profited supremely, because you don't need the market to go up to make money. The fact that almost every mutual fund lost money in my biggest year is not a statement about my stock-picking prowess but evidence that if you are disciplined, use common sense, and take advantage of all the devices and tools out there, you can profit no matter what. Or, as I say at the end of my radio show every day, "There's always a bull market somewhere" that you can make profits from.

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