Cramer Is Fun, Informative, and Mostly Wrong

Market 'genius' also took illegal bribe to tout penny stock

(NEWSER) - Lenny Dykstra, the fraudster Jim Cramer unwittingly turned into a stock-picking star, accepted an illegal bribe to pimp a penny stock on his TheStreet.com newsletter, Randall Lane of the Daily Beast reports. Dykstra secretly accepted $250,000 worth of Automated Vending Technologies shares in exchange for a plug in the newsletter and a promised meeting with Cramer, according to a former adviser to Dykstra, a retired baseball star. More»

The News Corp. mogul is interested, but the deal will likely not go through

(NEWSER) - Sources tell CNBC Rupert Murdoch wants to add a stake in NBC Universal to his ever-expanding media empire—which could lead to some awkward moments between Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann at the company Christmas party—but it probably won’t happen, writes John Cook on Gawker. Considering the ongoing negotiations between NBC parent company GE and Comcast, the rumors are “almost certainly just a way for GE to keep pressure on Comcast and let them know that it has other options.” More»

(NEWSER) - Jon Stewart, take note: Jim Cramer is not that bad at picking stocks, the New York Times reports. A study of Cramer’s televised market advice shows that the former hedge fund manager beat the market in 2005-07. The raw numbers from the fictional “Cramer portfolio” outperformed the S&P and other indices. With the addition of other factors, the CNBC host was merely so-so. More»

(NEWSER) - NBC CEO Jeff Zucker said today that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show attacks are “incredibly unfair to CNBC and the business media,” Broadcasting & Cable reports. “CNBC is a spectacular organization and in particular Jim Cramer,” Zucker continued. “What is going on now is absurd.” The media isn’t responsible for the financial crisis, he said, in the same way it’s not to blame for the Iraq war. More»

(NEWSER) - Jon Stewart’s takedown of Jim Cramer and CNBC is indicative of a real, if fleeting, sea change in our attitudes about the economy, Thomas Frank writes in the Wall Street Journal. “The applause Mr. Stewart has received for his j’accuse is the sound of the old order cracking.” But “clueless pundits often do get on top” and “stay there,” Frank writes, “despite all manner of rebukes handed down by history itself.” More»