Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 5/5/25
44:26 Share

The new Huggies Snug and Dry are luxuriously soft and ultra dry. How soft are we talking? Unbelievably soft. Irresistibly soft. Doesn't your baby deserve a diaper that's oh so gentle on their tushy? Huggies Snug and Dry helps keep them comfy, cozy, and protected. Experience the unexpected softness and up to 100% leak protection. More parents choose the new Huggies Snug and Dry softness versus the leading premium diaper. Huggies, we got you, baby.

You did it.

So tomorrow, you be the one who went to Jared. Hey, I'm Kramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Kramerica. Oh, you want to make friends? I'm just trying to make you some money. My job is not just to entertain, but to educate and teach you. So call me at 1-800-743-CNBC or tweet me at Jim Kramer. Whenever you're listening to anyone's investing advice, you need to consider the source. And ideally, you want to know where that person is coming from. That's why tonight I'm going to tell you exactly who I am.

and how I got here. No, not the standard introduction. I'm Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, co-host of Squawk on the Street, chief of the CBC Investing Club. What I want to do tonight in an extremely special show by even my wacky standards is trace the arc that brought me to Mad Money. Not for some autobiographical ego trip, but to give you some money-making lessons from the phases of my various careers.

And explain, of course, how you can pop the phone. Remember, in the end, this is Kramer America, and everything we do here is about trying to help you make money. In short, I'm giving you the Investor Kramer Guidebook. I call that the skinny on how I learned to be a good investor and how I continue to learn every day so I can help you become better than I ever, I want you to be better than I ever want to be. By the way, that's our mission in the investing club, too. Let's start real early. My love of stocks didn't begin after law school or college or even high school. No, my love for stocks started back in fourth grade. That's right, fourth grade.

You see, my dad would bring home the old Philadelphia Bulletin. Boy, that brings... What a long time ago that was. At that point, the Philadelphia Bulletin was one of the largest newspapers in the country. He'd have it when he came back from work every night and give it to me. I wanted the comics and sports. I was a ridiculous Phillies fan back then. I still am. It's a lifelong affliction, I guess, although I have pivoted hard toward the Eagles.

I was also curious, kid. Curiosity's always been both a blessing and a curse for me. Not unlike the proverbial cat that's always probing, looking, and occasionally jumping on some hot stoves. Anyway, there was always this solid chunk of the paper that seemed impenetrable to me. The business section.

It was impenetrable because it had these giant lists and names of an agate type that seemed to go on forever. There were the other tables, different from the batting averages tables and box scores I'd scrutinize as regularity. When I read them from left to right, they made no sense to me whatsoever. Open range, close? I mean, what's open? What range? What closed? What were these strange things? Why did they matter?

I asked my dad, who I knew dabbled in the stock market, because occasionally I'd hear him get mad when he heard prices that were mentioned on the radio. In particular, he always seemed to get angry when I heard something called national video and how it went out. I don't know what video did other than go out and why it went out. I don't know if Pop did either, though. But I know it made him furious. I wanted to know why.

So he sat me down one day and explained that each of those lines represented the performance of a stock at a company on a different day. The open was where the stock opened in the morning, the range was how low and high it traded during the day, and the close was what it was worth at the end of the day. That fascinated me. I mean, how could there be so many companies, and why the heck did they trade in ranges? He told me that each day, people tried very hard to figure out which stocks would go up in value, and they wanted to buy them so they could make money from those moves.

Frankly, this struck me as damn right silly. I told him that when I looked at baseball tables, I was always trying to figure out who was hot, who'd go up on average, who'd go down, and what it'd mean for the teams I liked, specifically, of course, the Phillies. He said it was pretty much the same thing with stocks. You studied the companies like you studied the players. Some players were doing just okay. Some were hot as a pistol. And, of course, others were just playing duds.

I wanted to figure out the stock market, too. I wanted to figure out which stocks would go higher, just like everybody else. I wanted to know if I could learn something from just following the ranges and reading the tables. He said, why don't you try? It seemed in my house the radio was always on until Pop put the TV on in time for dinner. We always watched the news while eating. Even as I admit, I hated it because most of the news was about the war. And that meant the Vietnam War. And it really seemed to be going well at all.

But right after the world news on the radio or TV, they always mentioned Dow Jones Industrial Averages. And they either talked about or showed the most active stocks than the ones that had done best or worst. National video, pop stock was off from the worst list. And that's why I guess my dad was so angry.

So what I did was write down the names that I heard. I tracked them, kept them in a ledger. I still have what a terrific game. It was trying to figure out the next move of a stock, not a player, even as I really knew was the name. Most of them were defense stocks and they went up a lot in tandem with the war.

After a year, I decided that was such a cool game that I wanted to introduce it to my fifth grade class. And so I did. Going in, show and tell with the Philadelphia Bulldogs, showing them the ledger, inviting them to play to see who could find stocks that would end up the most during the week. Needless to say, not everyone was into it, but

But the darndest thing happened not long after. My dad's company at the time, National Gift Wrap and Box Company, represented 3M, then known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company in the Philadelphia area. He sold tape and sashene. That was a fancy ribbon that bowed easily. Remember there was a time when you had to make your own bows? Triple M, as we called it, was always innovating, coming up with new product lines, which it still does. These days, it's also plagued, unfortunately, by major litigation issues.

issues. Right about fifth grade, Pop came home with a new line of 3M products he was selling. Games! That's right. They got into what was known as 3M bookshelf games. He said, perhaps I might want to learn more about the stock market. And he had two games that he was selling well about business. One was Acquire about takeovers, and the other was Stocks and Bonds.

I always cry when a good friend bought me this recently. I love that game so much. And at one point, I even asked the old CEO of 3M, bring the games back. Apparently, I don't own the rights anymore. But the point of mentioning all this from my own mixture of stock game to stocks and bonds is the stocks are fascinating enough to get your kids started on them right now. And I'm urging you to do just that. It's easier than ever. Pick some stocks, maybe some stocks of companies that your kids are familiar with. Then have them track those and guess which will do best over time.

So here's the bottom line, the bottom line, at least of my childhood stock market obsession. Get them started early and they may play for life because the stock market, it's a long term contest. The earlier you get in, the more you can potentially win over the long haul. Let's go to Dave in California, please. Dave. Hey, Jim. Thanks for taking my call. Of course. What's up, Dave?

Jim, I'm an older retired investor who's moving most of my stock portfolio gains into T-bonds and CDs. What are the advantages of bond ladders and how do those work? Well, I mean, look, I think that what I like about a bond ladder is it would normally matter a great deal. The yield curve is so flat. I'm trying to think. It really doesn't make me. People want to ladder bonds right now. It really doesn't make a lot of sense. I want you to stay short.

No reason to go out in the long end. And you can just keep reinvesting like that. But I also want, I'm not sure of your age, but I always want people to remember that I think you don't want to bet against yourself and put too much money in bonds because stocks still represent the greatest opportunity. And don't forget utility stocks. They can play a role, too. They could have multiple years of goodness. Let's go to Philip in Michigan. Please, Philip. What's up, Philip?

Hey, I wanted to thank you. I've been listening to your show since 2006 before my co-workers turned me on to the show. And you've made me all sorts of mad money. Oh, fantastic. Thank you for that. Thank you. I'm also a member of the CME Investment Club, so I enjoy tuning in to you every day and listening to you there as well. Okay. My question is...

So I know that you refer to dividend reinvestment as the eighth wonder of the world, and I'm totally there with you. All right. My specific question is, should I involve myself in my brokerage gift program, or should I take the cash and then put it back to work in a stock? No, I am a huge dividend reinvestment plan person. And as a matter of fact, I wish there weren't an alternative. But for my chapel trust, I have to send the dividends out.

And it has really hurt my long-term performance. You can't, you've got to reinvest and that's where some big money can be made. One of the biggest things I learned from getting interested in the stock market early is that it is a long-term contest. The earlier you get in, the more you can potentially win over the long haul.

On My Money Tonight, I'm giving you an inside look at how I got to where I am today, from growing up to Goldman Sachs. Along the way, you'll learn the best practices I learned about the market and how you can incorporate these life lessons yourself. So stay with Kramer.

Don't miss a second of Mad Money. Follow at Jim Cramer on X. Have a question? Tweet Cramer. Hashtag Mad Mentions. Send Jim an email to madmoneyatcnbc.com or give us a call at 1-800-743-CNBC. Miss something? Head to madmoney.cnbc.com.

The new Huggies Snug and Dry are luxuriously soft and ultra dry. How soft are we talking? Unbelievably soft. Irresistibly soft. Doesn't your baby deserve a diaper that's oh so gentle on their tushy? Huggies Snug and Dry helps keep them comfy, cozy, and protected. Experience the unexpected softness and up to 100% leak protection. More parents choose the new Huggies Snug and Dry softness versus the leading premium diaper. Huggies, we got you, baby.

Know what tomorrow is? It's that day you do something. Monumental or seemingly inconsequential. Start a new job, leave an old one. A big date or a small gathering. Drinks with a new someone or simply to strut past an old flame. So celebrate in style. Step out and stack on. Flash a look of bold 14 karat gold. Layer that fit with a solitaire diamond drip. Whatever the reason, Jared Jewelers has the perfect on-trend way to show the world you did it. So

So tomorrow, you be the one who went to Jared. This Mother's Day, show the moms in your life just how much they mean to you with a stunning bouquet from 1-800-Flowers.com. For almost 50 years, 1-800-Flowers has set the standard for high-quality bouquets. Right now, order early from 1-800-Flowers and save up to 40% on gorgeous bouquets and one-of-a-kind arrangements guaranteed to make her day. Save up to 40% today at 1-800-Flowers.com slash SXM.

That's 1-800-Flowers.com slash SXM. The official florist of Mother's Day. Welcome back to a bizarrely special Mad Buddy, where I'm teaching you life lessons in investing from my wife.

While I'm not a dollar sign represented by a man or a stock symbol, for that matter, ticker J-I-M, I've stumbled around the stock market long enough to learn a thing or two. So tonight, you're getting some of the wisdom from the school of hard knocks that I've enrolled in and passed. Don't you always love it at the beginning of a pro football game where they have the player say his name and his school and some say school of hard knocks? Well, that's what I attended when it comes to stocks. And you are getting the made for TV version right here, right now. For law school, I went to Harvard, though.

We covered how I first got involved in the market, my fourth-grade obsession with keeping a ledger to track stocks, and then ultimately learned how they trade through the greatest game on Earth. No, not Monopoly, but Sox and Bots, with its little certificates, its game board, and its cards about news that would set a stock higher or lower. I loved that game. I left the stock market games behind by the time I got to middle school, which we called junior high back then, where my obsession became sports. I was the second-fastest guy in the school forever. So I ran track, and then, of course, girls...

who my teenage self found far more mystifying than the market. Maybe still do. Anyway, that's the subject of a different show entirely. However, my father did ingrain in me the desire to save money. Early on, I learned that even in high school, I saved this. I bussed tables at the old Block and Cleaver, which, of course, we called the Block and Cleavage because we were really funny and we were at the height of adolescent humor.

I stayed more working as a vendor at the old veteran stadium selling first cold soda than ice cold. That's how I did it. Hey, ice cold. I got ice cold soda here. Then I only graduated into selling ice cream. Hey, I got ice cream, vanilla and chocolate. Very

Very quickly, I learned the value of market power, specifically cornering the market. And I paid people to give me the exclusive right to sell ice cream. Hey, ice cream here on the 600 and then on the 700 level, which I own by keeping everybody else out of it. Can you imagine how much money can be made if you had the only franchise, the whole upper deck? Well, at least it's the upper, upper deck. Even for a team as horrible as the Phillies, which won almost no games. I made fortunes, except the one time they gave me strawberry ice cream.

Talk about having to run from a customer after you sold him that stuff. Or when Steve Carleton pitched because Lefty was on the mound, he got fired out so fast that I got stuck's unsold ice cream. I had all this strawberry. You can't take it home. Real bad. You had to buy it from the company before selling it, so I'd take a beating whenever Carleton was on the mound. That's a business lesson. Talk about learning how business really works. The shelf life of ice cream on a hot July night after the ninth inning is about as short as short can be.

By the way, during the lightning round, I might jest with you about your name, calling you, hey, Skipper, hey, Captain, how you doing? Chief. I learned these names at the ballpark. It's what people call me to get my attention, to buy ice cream. Hey, Chief. And frankly, I loved it, and it's bizarre intimacy, and I never forgot the monikers, bud, I mean partner, and that's why I use those terms on my money.

Anyway, I made a ton of money. It's the advice of my father. I opened an account at Fidelity with the Magellan Fund. I contribute a little every week. It was the top performing mutual fund of its time, run by the great Peter Lynch, who's written two investment books, one up on Wall Street and Beating the Street, still available on Amazon. They are fabulous. Get them.

I didn't save enough when I got to college. The money paid was work-study anyway, and it went toward my tuition and ruined my work. But when I got out of college and after multiple attempts to get a job in the newspaper business, I was rejected by 57 papers. I still have the rejections. I've saved every one of them. I hate everybody who rejected me. Never mind. I landed a position as a general assignment reporter at the Taliesin Democrat, crap-making $156 a week.

$150 a week was not a lot to really kind of... Well, anyway, I still kept a tattered pay stub. I've got it in an old wallet to remind me of how hard it was when I got started. Nevertheless, you know what? I still saved. I put a few dollars away when I could. A few dollars. I mean, like, maybe $4. Not that long after that, I applied and got a job at the now defunct Los Angeles Harvard Examiner. Now it was a horrible job paying $179 a week, but as you can imagine, Los Angeles is more expensive than that.

Tallahassee. Soon after my sojourn began in Los Angeles, I found this terrific bungalow apartment in what was known as the Fairfax District, right near Cantor's. Pretty sketchy, around the corner from Pioneer Chicken, which was way too expensive for me to go to. A few weeks later, I was stalked. My place was broken into repeatedly, something the cops were helpless to stop. At the same time, I was assigned a story in San Diego, a horrible shooting. And when I returned, everything was gone. Everything. Everything I had, including my checkbook, of which, of course, was cleaned out.

So it began my terrible but thrilling six months of living in my car, basically trying to get by.

While my ultimate goal was to save enough to get an apartment, I was living hand-to-mouth. And people would take me in now and then so I could get a shower. It's really important when you live in a car to get that shower. Or maybe even a good night's sleep. But you know what? I never quit saving. I remember cashing my paycheck every other week and then writing a check yes to Fidelity Evangelion Fund for what I could afford. You only have your gasoline, car insurance, and food expenses if you're living in your car. During saving on homeowners insurance, by the way, which was very expensive back then,

News to say, it was unsustainable. When I only came down with mononucleosis and then the attendant joined a sliver, yellow spot about the size of Greenland, you know, on those Mercado projectors on my stomach. I had no health care. The HMO my newspaper belonged to had no branch where I was at last station when the company mercifully put me on the road so I could at least submit some expenses for my day to day. So I had to go to a migrant farm workers clinic to get fixed up.

and I still put money away, even then. Even as I was making my weekly trips to the doctor, who was one of the best I've ever had. But the upshot of investing is, this is a challenge. The whole story is a challenge, and this is what it is. If I was living in my car and I invested, I never want to hear that you didn't see. Never. That's why I went through this. Amazing with the Magellan Fund back.

Back then, I was giving money to the best stock picker of all time. Fast forward 35 years later, I ended up taking advantage of one of the greatest bull markets in history. Magellan money ultimately amounted to a fund well into the six figures, not because of my additional contributions, which remember, only just a few dollars a month, but purely from capital appreciation and the power of compounding. I never touched it. Still haven't. I just let it build.

I think the takeaway here is that I want you to save no matter what the excuse. Obviously, the earlier the better. Through thick and thin. Listen, when CNBC has those all-star managers on, keep your ear open. If you don't have enough money or handle the time to own a stock portfolio, you can only own one or two stocks, send the money in, as little money as you can, to an index fund, to one of these big mutual funds. If you need help managing your own portfolio, join the investing club. I think that's the best way to go. And here's the real bottom line.

If I could still send those checks that Fidelity Magellan found when I was living in my car, sleeping in the back, Jack Daniels and a hatchet, and then ultimately a, yes, pistol, sick as a dog, joined a sliver, then what's your excuse for not getting started? You can put some money away, too. That's the way I was living. They had money back then. Coming up, take a trip down memory lane. The hair is gone, but the wisdom tolls on. Stick with Kramer.

Booyah for the emperor of Kramerica. Honorable James J. Kramer. You got me jumping around my office right now. Thank you so much for all you do for us. I enjoy your show and it's very entertaining and informative. I watched your first ever episode of Mad Money back in 2005 and I've been watching every single episode ever since. Don't miss Mad Money every night at 6 p.m. Eastern. Plus, join the CNBC Investing Club and stick with Kramer around the clock.

Don't just ride the index, seek to outperform it with FELC, the Fidelity Enhanced Large Cap Core ETF. Unlike passive ETFs, FELC is run by a team of experts to adapt to market conditions and pursue upside potential wherever it's hiding. And

And while you get the potential outperformance of an actively managed fund, you can still buy and sell it on your terms, just like any other ETF. Discover FELC, the Fidelity Enhanced Large Cap Core ETF, part of Fidelity's suite of active ETFs. Learn more at fidelity.com slash FELC.

Before investing in any exchange-traded fund, you should consider its investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Contact Fidelity for a prospectus, an offering circular, or, if available, a summary prospectus containing this information. Read it carefully. While active ETFs offer the potential to outperform an index, these products may more significantly trail an index as compared with passive ETFs. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC. Member NYSC SIPC.

Moms deserve our very best, especially on Mother's Day. There's only one place I trust to deliver high-quality, mom-approved rose bouquets, 1-800-Flowers.com. This year, 1-800-Flowers wants to make sure all the mothers in your life get the best with double the roses for free. When you buy one dozen, they'll double your bouquet to two dozen roses.

To claim the double roses offer, go to 1-800-Flowers.com slash SXM. That's 1-800-Flowers.com slash SXM. The official florist of Mother's Day. We're riding the magical money mystery tour tonight. I'm giving you the life lessons I've learned the hard way through decades of investing. Right now, I want to tell you how I got started in individual stock picking. Something you know I love and still believe in, even after multiple periods of pain, chaos, and chicanery. Presumably you believe too, or else you wouldn't be watching.

If you're picking stocks, playing with real money, not just with a ledger or with a game of stocks and bonds, you need to open an account. When I got started in 1979, there was no such thing as an online account. I had my money with Fidelity, courtesy of my Magellan Fund account, so I chose to put my individual stock account there, too.

When I first began, I didn't know where to look for ideas. So I turned to a magazine I liked, Forbes. Now, people of Forbes, please don't take this personally, but I read a nifty article about American agronomics. A terrific orange grower in Florida seemed so compelling that I bought 10 shares of it for nine bucks. A week later, Frost hit, wiped out the crop, and my investment was more than cut in half. Like the plot of Trading Places, an all-time great Eddie Murphy movie, if you've ever seen it. Well, what can I say? Pretty similar.

I was devastated but not defeated. I sold it out, took the capital, and bought seven shares of Bobby Brooks, a clothing outfit I'd heard of, which, again, Forbes said could be a terrific buy. Almost immediately, the company reported a big quarter of my money half to get. Fortunately, I had a decent job at a magazine called American Warrior, which had just started. I was making 20 Gs and living in a less-than-swank studio on 44th Street between 1st and 2nd, near the United Nations. The cheap $40 a month rent allowed me to replenish my stock offers pretty quickly.

I was on the road quite a bit back then, and after a particularly hard night on the town researching a story in Kentucky, I fell in love with a breakfast at Bob Evans Farms. Finding out that it was publicly traded when I went back

I visited that huge, fabulous Midtown Manhattan, New York public library. It had ones with the big lines in front of it and devoured everything I could find about Bob Evans. They had magazines with articles, microfiche of four-month-old financials, investment publications, with write-ups that allowed me to compare Bob Evans with other companies in the industry, which is what you have to do. I knew I had a good one, so I bought 20 shares. Stock went up immediately on a good quarter, and the stock split, and I figured out the first good component of investing. Know what you own. What did I know?

about growing oranges with American agronomics. I mean, do I know anything about women's fashion? I mean, certainly not me. But a good plate of scrambled eggs and sausage after a hard night on the town, well, that serves an attractive setting, good service, nice enough growth, a big plan to expand the Midwest. That was for me.

Next up, SPS Technologies. That's the old standard pressed steel, an outfit from my old hometown that made fasteners, screws for airplanes, something that Hal Mett now dominates. Why SPS? Because a buddy of mine from high school catching up with me told me that they were hiring like mad if I was looking for a job.

Paying good money. Well, I already had a job, but back to the library for more research. Solid company, no debt, but nothing in print about its hiring push. Wow, ripe for a trade. SPS doubled not long after, and I caught the bug for good. 23 years later, it will be acquired by Precision Task Force, the preeminent supplier to aircraft builders around the globe, before PCP went on to sell itself to Berkshire Hathaway in 2016. Good bloodlines. So now I'm figuring it out. The best investment ideas come from what you know, melded with information gleaned from public sources, even

they're as late and as hard to access as taking a surreptitious trip to your public library when I was supposed to be working. I didn't like the random way I was making money. A friend from home's lucky call about jobs available at SPS Technologies, a hearty breakfast at Bob Evans Farms. I mean, I figured that'd be a more rigorous approach, right? And then it hit me. Look around at work, stupid. At the time, I was covering mergers and acquisitions, looking at the lawyers who do the deals, profiling some, following the deals they were on.

It seemed like every other deal was in the oil patch. One after another, small to mid-sized oil companies were being acquired, and all I was doing was standing around writing about them. So I went back to the library, took out some editions of a thing called Value Line, a stock research magazine, and checked out the pages devoted to oil companies.

Then I cross-referenced them with other research to find out which ones could be acquired without problems, either because they were publicly traded without a family owning them or because they seemed to fit the size, the parameters of so many other deals. So I started on this thing called Natomas, an oil company with a real gusher in Indonesia. Oh, I didn't have long to wait.

Kerr McGee struck. Bought him. Almost doubled my money. Another lesson learned. Went to Blake Day covers, buy companies that would do well on their own. Natomas was, but it was under managed, which was the consensus I found by reading the articles about the oil enterprise. That meant another oil company with bigger scale could do more with Natomas, which was cheaper than it should be if it simply got rid of the existing management. As much as I had hit some winners, though, I was distraught that I'd given up the ghost in those first few trades. At the time, I'd been hanging around the track on weekends, mostly aqueduct. Nearby.

And I learned how to handicap by reading the books of Andy Beyer, the legendary horse racing writer. He is something, okay? Beyer's Picking Winners is among the best investing books ever written, even as he's betting on the ponies. It teaches discipline, how to identify the best thoroughbreds to bet on, how to find the best long shots, going to the out-of-the-way tracks where information was less well-known, not betting really nilly on every horse in each race. Find the ones where the payoff was more sure and bet big. Cut your losses if you're having a bad run.

Every one of these lessons could be applied to the stock market, right? I mean, you can take a huge swing when you know what you're doing, particularly when others don't on a less well-known stock out of the way track. Don't just gamble on stocks for the excitement of it. That is foolish. Most important, be disciplined. Don't let your losses pile up.

After five years of professional journalism, I decided to hang it up and go back to law school. The good news? I'd saved enough money to pay for my first year on the stock market, as I never would have had enough money to cover the cost if I had just kept my money in a savings account. So here's the bottom line. You want to get started, go small. Invest in what you know. Research intensely. Just research, research, research. Back

then, I got old data from Public Library. Now, it's as simple as a keystroke and the information is free, including up-to-the-minute financials, analyst presentations, brokerage research, and of course, the conference calls that I tell you are a must if you want to actually know what you're doing. Simple? No. Lucrative? You bet it is. Let's go to Michael in California, please. Michael. Michael.

Yes, Jim. First of all, thanks for taking my call. Of course. I'll try and make this as quick as possible. I know we've got a lot of people to help here. This has to concern my two children. I inherited recently quite a deal of money, not a million dollars, but a substantial amount.

And I'm looking at a 20 to 30-year time frame here. I've been investing for them since the day they were born. They're doing all right, but I want them to leave them some good, good money. I'm thinking on the lines of Berkshire B. Now, this is putting all this money.

But it should be an ETF, a Vanguard ETF or some of that somewhere along those lines. OK, I think that S&P 500 fund and the total return funds are both really good for that kind of situation. Vanguard's total return. The one thing I would caution is as much as I like Warren Buffett,

I just think that you have to have kind of a basket if you do one stock. But if you do the ones that I just mentioned, you don't need a basket, and you don't have to keep track of them every minute. By the way, if they're young enough, maybe you give them something that they actually want to spend some time learning about, and that could be good, too, to keep them invested and interested in their money. But thank you for those kind questions. And let's go to Loyal in Arkansas. Loyal. Yes, sir. How are you doing, Mr. Kramer? I'm doing well, Loyal. How about you? I'm doing all right.

I want to know, getting back into the market with 11K, what's the best way to have a long-term goal but get a short-term return within a year or two on your investment? Well, you know, that's...

It's too risky, frankly. At one time or another, I think in my earlier years, I would have suggested call options and then also some longer term stocks and mutual funds. But these days, I'm just against the short term stuff. I can't deliver and I don't want to encourage trading. But thank you so much.

I wish I could do better for you, but it's just not my thing. Trading things, not my thing. Anyway, if you want to get started in stocks, go small. Invest in what you know and research intensely. The process may not be simple, but boy, it can be lucrative. Much more Mad Money Head, including an inside look at what I learned from my time at Goldman Sachs. Plus, I'm taking your investing questions with my investing club colleague, Jeff Marks. So stay with Kramer.

Coming up, how has investing changed since Quamer's hedge fund days? We count the ways, and the answer may surprise you. Next.

Good evening, Mr. Kramer. Thank you. Thank you for everything you do. You've been such a wonderful source of information with your teachings. I have to say thanks. Thank you for all your advice and saving us from ourselves. Your advice let me quit a job that I hated. I love you to death. Thank you for everything you do. Thanks for making us money. And more importantly, thanks for keeping us from losing money.

Tonight's show is all about you learning from my attendance at what we call the University of Financial Hard Knocks with a major in investing. I've taken you through the importance of getting started early, saving no matter what. I've shown you how to spot winners, avoid losers, state discipline, all through looking at my actual examples in my life.

Now I want to give you a sense of how you can become a trader. Uh-oh, here we go, a good trader. And I don't normally recommend this. It's not the direction I like to take the show. Man, money has changed time and time again. After the first few years, I've deliberately scooted away from trading and trading ideas and much more toward long-term investing.

And that's because there's so many more obstacles to trading than investing these days. When you're a trader, you have to watch your positions like a hawk during the day to the point where it's very hard to do your job and follow the market. There are so many people with such a great set of tools and the ability to access information real time. There are so many different products that allow hedge funds to move stocks around like toys. It's very hard to compete against them. You can't do the one on one, especially when you're doing it part time.

But there's some advantages you have now that you sure didn't when I started trading in my law school dorm back in 1981, and I was trading, not investing. First, commissions are non-existent for home gamers, so you can get in and get out without much friction. Your broker doesn't even take a fee.

Second, the information you need is on your personal computer or even your smartphone. Back in the day, I had to call brokers and watch the ticker on FNN, precursor to CNBC, by the way. And third, trading is lightning fast. Back then, I didn't even know what price I paid for stock or when I bought it, market order, whatever. When I was in class, I had to use payphones, no cell. You often had to wait at one payphone in the classroom building while some kid chatted endlessly and aimlessly to his girlfriend, maybe some woman called mom.

At the time, though, I had to go with what I knew. I knew individual stocks. For all the stories about Harvard Law School, including the movie Paper Chase, I can tell you there was tons of downtime at law school and terrific business school library that had a lot of sell-side research. That's the stuff the brokers turned down. Along with up-to-date microfeesh, quarterly reports, you probably don't know that. For those who are too young to remember microfeesh, they miniaturized everything into a little piece of film, and then you had to read it through a machine that was basically a glorified microscope. Although

Please consider I possess the best publicly available information at the time for a student that you get in the early 80s. The first thing I decided to do, though, given the circumstances, was to work on finding one training idea per week. My reasoning was pretty simple. You can't be all over the map if you're doing this as a hobby, even a time intensive one. I figured I couldn't take a lot of chances until I really knew what I was doing. A very valuable lesson if you want to start trading.

I discarded a ton of ideas looking for stocks that had catalysts, upcoming reports, or possible mergers, and stock that could rally based on the other parts of the newspaper. An article on the front page might be talking about some breakthrough in medicine. A brokerage report might discuss the potential for a new oil fund. I got on a roll when I started my first writing about the market. It was a newsletter called Mr. Bullish, which I mailed only to my parents once a week since no one else cared about what I thought. And it clearly articulated the thesis behind any trade I did.

I did not trade if I couldn't explain exactly what the company did and why I liked it and what would happen to the stock. What was the catalyst to buy? No buying of anything that didn't have a clear exit strategy from the moment I put the trade on. Again, important lesson. Made disciplined by the insistence of written thesis before I pulled the trigger.

When you trade, you've got to trade with confidence. Otherwise, you can easily be shaken out by the broader market. You want to trade with confidence? Well, ask yourself, would you be willing to put a stock recommendation on your voicemail? Yeah, we used to have those and update it every week. Well, at that point, it was a recorder. It was something like this for me. Hi, this is Jim Cramer. I'm not here right now, but I like monolithic memories at $32 ahead of the next quarter.

Yeah, I actually did that. That's the level of conviction I had about my picks of the week. Of course, I was putting my money where my mouth was and managed to augment the winnings with work I got from my old employer, American Lawyer, along with some freelance work for the New York Times and some legal work for a professor who moonlaid during doing these criminal defense cases. It's kind of a famous guy, but we won't go into that.

It wasn't before long that a fellow by the name of Marty Pergs, at that point the publisher for The New Republic, also a professor and a teacher at Harvard, tried to get me to write a piece. I neglected to call him back, so we inadvertently got three weeks' worth of trades for my answering machine, all successful. And he told me to meet him at a coffee house nearby. When I did, he said that he made more money from my answering machine than he had with years of professional money managers, and he wanted to give me a half million dollars to manage.

I said, I didn't think I was capable of handling that amount. He said he had confidence in me. And shortly thereafter, when we were having a cup of coffee, he pulled out a check for a half million bucks. That was real money back then. I ran out of fidelity with the money and set up an account and went right to work trading. Almost immediately, I lost a ton of it. And I could see how I might have to watch Disney's morning. He's asked me to mow his lawn for about like 100 years to make back the 70 G's I'd just blown to smithereens.

My mistake, as Clint Eastwood told us in that seminal movie Magnum Force, a man's got to know his own limitations. You see, you can't trade a huge chunk of money all at once. Total violation of all my weekly discipline, right? You can't put it all to work at once. You have to do some. So you do that if you've done a huge amount of work. You have to have a chance to pan out an entry point. You had to come up with a reasonable entry point and an exit. In other words, you had to know how to trade. And I didn't. And I had no discipline. I violated my own rules and I blew it.

I confessed my sins to Marty. He said, I said, please take the money back. Instead, he wanted me to have more money, betting that I'd learn my lesson. You know what? He was right.

I reverted to my old style, trying to be right about one idea at a time, keeping the rest in cash, doing a huge amount of homework, going big when I had the most conviction, the way any good trader would. I slowly but surely made it back while I also paper invested a more active but not truly trading portfolio to get a better feel of things. That would become the beginning of my actual professional investing career. And we made a huge amount of money together. Don't mind saying that. So here's the bottom line. If you're trying to trade, make sure you have a catalyst and inspiration.

an exit point where something's supposed to happen, and then get out of the stock, even if the idea doesn't pan out, because you're trading, not investing. You need conviction, and you have to ask yourself, would you be willing for the world to hear, hi, it's me, I'm not here right now, but I want you to take a big swing at Disney ahead of the analyst meeting. If you can do these things, start small. Give it a try. NetMoney's back.

♪♪♪

Welcome back to this special edition of Mad Money, where I've been teaching you life lessons in investing from my life. Now we're up to the professional grade when I started at Goldman Sachs. I've been courted by Goldman for three years before I got a job in what was then the security sales department, helping individuals and small institutions manage their money.

I've got a ton of history from those years, and if you want to know more about it, I suggest you read Confessions of a Street Addict, my autobiography. But tonight's show, like every show, is about learning how to trade and invest. So I'll dispense with the anecdotes and try to teach you how to make money from the events that transpired from my time at Goldman.

First, that's when I began understanding the process of actual money management, the ability to build a portfolio from the ground up. And I had the best teachers in the world. One of the great hedge fund managers of our time, Lee Cooperman, he was the research director at Goldman, and he put on investing clinics almost daily. But you know who I learned the most from?

my customers. Cheaply wealthy individuals from all walks of life. At Goldman, I learned something that to this day can't be understood by so many professionals in this business. Individuals can and do beat the market quite regularly.

I have what's known as non-discretionary accounts, meaning that I wasn't allowed to invest anyone else's money with my own ideas unless I could win them over to make the purchase. Remember, I was on commission and made money only with the buys or sells I could convince people to act on. That's where I learned how important it was to talk over a story with an individual and be able to articulate it in a way that made sense to them. Can you do that to someone when you're picking a stock? You had to know your stuff.

I often ask my clients questions about whether they knew enough about the stocks that they wanted to buy.

I wanted them to be as educated as possible, too. That's because I knew that if the stock went up, it would be their idea, but if it went down, it'd be mine. Hey, come on, that's human nature. What else did I learn? How about humility? It was at Goldman Sachs that I first figured out how humbling this business could be. The great 80s bull market had just started not long before I'd been hired. Almost all stocks had tremendous tailwinds. But when one of your ideas went against you, you had to get on the horn and explain either why the person should buy more

or why they should cut their losses.

I also learned to let your gains run while you cut those losses. I learned the hard way. Many of my clients were terrific business people who didn't really know that much about stocks. They'd just been fabulous at running their own enterprises. I had a real cantankerous client, a real estate tycoon, who I worked hard to get, trying to win him over for ages. I told him I'd be judicious, work hard, and get it right for him. He said he didn't want trades. He wanted long-term investments.

At the time, I happened to like the stock of Kimberly-Clark. I told him that I thought this one would be a terrific addition to his portfolio. He agreed, and I bought him 1,000 shares. Almost immediately, the stock went up eight points. Oh, I had a winner. So I called him, and I said, Bob, I want to ring the register and sell the 1,000 shares of Kimberly-Clark. I thought he would thank me, but he was furious at me.

He told me that I had said that Kimberly would be a good long-term position, that it could have great gains over time, and that he wasn't the least bit interested in only making $8,000. Then he questioned my integrity and wanted to know if I was churning him a horrible charge, meaning I was just trying to generate commissions off his account. You know what? I was scorched. I was burned.

But it taught me a terrific lesson. Just as you don't want to turn a trade into investment because that's usually a sign that you're embracing a loss and trying to invent reasons to stick with it, you also don't want to turn an investment into a trade. When you have a good one, let it run for heaven's sake. Bob was right. Give me the clock or it will be doubled. And I was vindicated despite myself. Finally, I learned the science behind building a portfolio and understanding how to create long-term wealth. A

A lot of my business involved contacting people who just came into a great deal of cash, either through inheritance or through the sale of a business. I regarded my first job as listening to their needs, trying to figure out what they wanted. Were they conservative? Did they want capital preservation? Were they aggressive? Did they want capital appreciation? I tried to get them, I tried to get to know them.

and urge them to get to know themselves just as you should know yourself. Can you handle the pain of a market decline? Would you prefer your money to appreciate slowly and get most of it from fixed income, meaning bonds or from dividends? Do you want to participate in new issues? Do you want to try to hit it out of the park with some of your capital? Of course, many of you are familiar with these lessons. I know that. You've heard me say them time and again on air, preaching them constantly to the CNBC Investing Club. I try to teach you how to know yourself.

to know what you can handle and what you can't. Finally, this is when I learned the value of diversification. When I first got to Goldman Sachs, the oils were hot as a pistol. I mean, you understand those were different days. You can have an oil company double and then double again in a short time. As they struck oil, we figured out, wow, how big those fines must be. So everyone got caught up in the oils. The families I worked for wanted oils. I wanted oils for my personal account. Every day seemed like another great day in the oil patch. Services, drillers, you name it.

Then one day, oil plummeted. The soities started pumping like mad and some global tensions that had jacked up the prices were settled. Next thing you know, the bull morphed into a bear. Those who own nothing but oil stocks, including yours truly, were crushed. I learned firsthand the concept of diversification. And while I've occasionally violated some of my rules, I never again intensely avoided diversification. So here's the bottom line.

From my early days at Goldman Sachs, I learned the core principles of investing, finding solid ideas to build a diversified portfolio to create long-term wealth in a way that suits the customer. Consider yourself the customer of this show. Stick with me. Coming up, Wall Street's most reliable tag team squares off to answer your questions. Keep in touch. Mad Money will be right back.

Booyah, Jim. Your integrity makes you the booyah saint of Wall Street. Booyah, Jimmy Till. Booyah, Jimmy Till. Booyah, Jim. Quadruple. That's a lot of booyahs.

Through this entire show tonight, you've heard me pound the table on how investing in the stock market is a long-term contest. Emphasis long-term. So you're never too young to start investing, just like you're never too old to learn new things about the market. I love to teach my viewers and also learn from them, which is why I always say my favorite part of the show is answering questions directly from you. So tonight I have Jeff Marks here, my portfolio analyst, partner in crime at the CBC Investing Club.

We're going to answer some of your most burning questions, which are always amazing. Frankly, I've learned so much. Let's give you an inside look at what we do in the club. By the way, if you're not a member of the club, you can scan the code behind me or go to CNBC dot com slash investing club to sign up. I sure hope you will. All right. Let's take our first question.

First up, we have a question from Sandy, who asks, my husband and I are at retirement age. He likes dividend stocks, but I don't like holding them when they lose value. And my original investment is in the negative. I prefer solid growth stocks to continue to build our portfolio. Keep or sell these losers. Now, I'm going to start by telling you right here, retirement age. OK, that's the eye of the beholder. I have been a big believer, contrary to the entire industry, in saying there may not be a retirement age when it comes to stocks. I'm not a retirement age.

I think that people should always be investing for growth and some for dividend and then some for bonds. So my answer to this one is that you have to kind of at times take the risk, but you just use smaller amounts of your capital.

Yeah, I think that there's always a balance to everything, right? One thing I would point out is without knowing the stock, if the dividend investment is in the red, well, maybe they're not growing their cash flow, their earnings. Maybe they're not growing their dividends. And that could be a red flag that something's wrong about the company. I mean, for instance, you know that we got involved with Foot Locker, right?

and their cash flow declined, and what looked like a good dividend stock became a non-dividend stock. So, Sandy, I think that we, unfortunately, you have to do a level of homework. Of course, join the club, and we will point them out, but then you can say, listen, we missed Foot Locker. You're going to miss things.

But what matters is I want you to have more exposure to the stocks than people expect, because retirement age may be something that turns out to be 20 years before you need to grow capital for that 20 years. All right, next up is Bruce, and he's in Michigan.

And he says, how do you set price targets? I am going to defer to my colleague who does a lot of the price target setting. Well, look, I think it's an art and a science, right? Um, there's no one standard rule of thumb to apply, but what I will say though, uh,

when looking for price targets. What you can do is look at some historical multiples of where stocks trade at and try and figure out how much you think the stock will earn out in the future and apply that. But another key consideration, too, is that if the company is improving its margins, maybe taking share, then it would deserve to trade at a premium versus its historical levels or maybe at least

catch up, so to speak, the multiple re-rate closer to some peers in this space. During the great runs that were Lily and NVIDIA, how

How did you go about setting price charts? Well, I mean, look, those are also some of the great momentum stocks of the last couple of years, too. So that, I would say, is a little bit of an art. But again, stocks like that, you also have to look out years out in advance, too, especially in the case of Eli Lilly, where it's more towards the end of the decade is where its GLP-1 sales will really be big. So people know, we take them very seriously. Yeah.

OK, now let's go to Lindsay in Oregon, where my daughter had her formative years, who asked, well, how do you trip a position? Do you sell shares with the lowest cost basis or the highest cost basis? Well, this is actually this is an accounting issue. Yeah, there are rules on what you can and what you can't do.

We are just people know we send everything out, all our capital gains out and all our dividends out. And we often want to try to get rid of the of the ones that has the worst basis. That's been our kind of stock and trade. Yeah. I mean, look, this is always a question of tax considerations. Right. Because if you're taking a profit and you're selling a lower tax basis, you'll trigger a higher profit.

realized gain. And on the other hand, if it's for a loss and you sell that lower basis, it's a smaller loss. So it's tax considerations. Now, just so you know, my accountant says, Jim, just take it as they come. Last and first out. Why is that? Don't ever get in trouble. There's my lesson for the IRS and you. I like to say there's always a bull market somewhere. I promise to try to find it just for you right here on Mad Money. I'm Jim Cramer. See you next time.

All opinions expressed by Jim Cramer on this podcast are solely Cramer's opinions and do not reflect the opinions of CNBC, NBCUniversal, or their parent company or affiliates, and may have been previously disseminated by Cramer on television, radio, internet, or another medium.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by Jim Cramer as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. Cramer's opinions are based upon information he considers reliable, but neither CNBC nor its affiliates and or subsidiaries warrant its completeness or accuracy, and it should not be relied upon as such. To view the full Mad Money Disclaimer, please visit cnbc.com forward slash madmoneydisclaimer.

Know what tomorrow is? It's that day you do something. Monumental or seemingly inconsequential. Start a new job, leave an old one. A big date or a small gathering. Drinks with a new someone or simply to strut past an old flame. So celebrate in style. Step out and stack on. Flash a look of bold 14-karat gold. Layer that fit with a solitaire diamond drip. Whatever the reason, Jared Jewelers has the perfect on-trend way to show the world you did it.

So tomorrow, you be the one who went to Jared.