Cramer Debate: How Bad is He?

Jimothee Cramer. The Mad Money Manz. That old dawg of FinTwit. He’s kinda like your kooky uncle who can’t help but saying some weird shit at Thanksgiving dinner — but you love ‘em anyways because he means well.

One of the most-known (and most-mocked) TV stockpickers of the early 2000’s, Jim’s actually managed to build more of reputation amongst the youth in recent years… for supposedly being pretty awful at stock-picking.

Like, almost notoriously bad.

Nowadays it’s become a pretty common shtick for people to poke fun at his picks whenever he tweets ‘em out; there are literally entire Twitter accounts & ETF’s dedicated to shorting what he says hahaha: @CramerTracker

But… is he really that bad?

We decided to find out for ourselves — to settle the debate of whether he’s worth paying attention to once & for all.

So we doomscrolled our way through his tweets from the past six months, analyzed the sentiment of each of his stock picks (using babbl’s news monitoring website), and tracked the performance of each one over time. Here’s what we found:

Analysis of @JimCramer’s Tweet Picks:

Since August, Jim has tweeted 339 times (excluding replies). Of these, we could only find about 39 (~1 in 9) containing explicit bullish or bearish sentiment about an individual stock — so we focused on these. Things like:

• @jimcramer: "The lack of respect for META 0.75%↑ is incredible...” [bullish]
• @jimcramer: “Goldman, i worked for you. You were terrific. But i worry about your quarter as well as your cranial power…” [bearish]

We made a list of all these bullish/bearish stock mentions, then went back and calculated the percent change of each stock’s price over the two weeks that followed. The complete table of results is right here.

The Results:

Over the past 6-months, if you bought Jim’s picks on the day he mentioned them & sold two weeks later each time (the opposite goes for bearish picks) on a $1000 principle investment, you would now have $165.90.

More succinctly: his picks since August would be down -83% cumulatively. Some specifics:

• Individually, the average 2-week return on Jim’s picks was -4% (not great)
• Jim tends towards being bullish (🟢28 picks) instead of bearish (🔴11 picks)
• On average, his bullish picks did better (-2.7% 2w) than his bearish picks (-6.9%)
• His worst pick (by far) was going full bear mode on BBBY -16.39%↓ the week before the stock mooned +120% 😅

There you have it folks. TBH I was rooting for Jim here, hoping that this would avenge his name as a stock picker. Alas, the inverse-Cramer method would have paid off well.

It goes to show… Jim is an entertainer folks, he’s not the authority on quality stocks to dollar-cost-average into. He’s here to keep things interesting, not be your financial advisor.

After all, his show was called Mad Money for a reason… because trading the stocks he picks at face value would be a bit insane. 😂

‍

‍

*this blog post is a sub-section of Babbl's Market Mood substack newsletter. Click here to view the original post*