Confessions of a Street Addict or Bear Trap

Confessions of a Street Addict

Author: James J Cramer

In the most candid look at Wall Street since Liar's Poker, James J. Cramer, cofounder of TheStreet.com, radio and television commentator, and for years one of Wall Street's premier money managers, takes readers on a no-holds-barred tour of life on Wall Street-revealing how the game is played, who breaks the rules, and who gets hurt.

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. Inone 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.

Publishers Weekly

Cramer, famous for appearing on CNBC as the "wild excitable guy [with]... a big mouth and lots of passion talking authoritatively about how you could make money by getting on the Net," recounts his turbulent dual career as hedge fund manager and media pundit. Cramer tells of his lifelong obsession with the market, beginning with childhood scenes of poring over daily stock listings. The story kicks into high gear once he starts juggling his law school course load so he can spend as much time as possible trading (over the phone, in the pre-Internet '80s). After that, the narrative's pace never relents from depictions of Cramer's early days at Goldman Sachs through the launch of his own fund, which led to magazine columns, a near-constant presence on TV, and TheStreet.com. Cramer's description of the financial news Web site's launch is ruthless, not just toward the executives whose scheming and mismanagement, he says, undermined TheStreet.com's success, but toward himself for hiring them and temporarily destroying his long-standing friendship with publishing fixture Marty Peretz. Cramer is equally self-recriminating about the effect his fanatical trading had on his personal life, but clearly still loves to linger over every major deal of his career (and a lot of the minor ones), even perhaps especially if they blew up in his face. This is a lively, informative portrait of the highest levels of finance and media in the last decade. Agent, Suzanne Gluck. (May 13) Forecast: In mid-March, HarperCollins published Nicholas W. Maier's Trading with the Enemy, a kiss-and-tell about Cramer. HC's decision to pulp the book due to false assertions it contains about Cramer will no doubt fuel interest in Cramer's book. Expect lots of buzz in financial publications and decent sales in Manhattan and Silicon Valley bookstores. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Cramer here presents his wild, fast-paced autobiography, which focuses on his colorful career as a successful Wall Street hedge fund manager. The popular stock market commentator for CNBC begins his story with his fascinating early days as a nine-year-old stock ticker reader. Cramer continues with his time at Harvard Law School, when he began to manage money for others; his short stint with Goldman Sachs and decision to leave a $1 million annual salary to set up his own hedge fund partnership; and, of great interest to investors, the forming of Cramer, Berkowitz, one of the street's most successful funds, with an annual return of 24 percent after fees. Throughout this tale, listeners will connect as the author willingly shares his characteristically outspoken, candid remarks about his personal life and his successes and failures balancing family with the stress of high-stakes investing. The inside account of the facts behind the founding of TheStreet.com, his online web site, reveals what actually happened to this once-high-flying IPO that served as a forerunner of the recent dot-bomb era. Cramer's brisk, proud narration keeps the attention high in this riveting work; recommended for larger public library business collections.-Dale Farris, Groves, TX

Kirkus Reviews

Wall Street's most notorious bull bares all in this typically over-the-top memoir. If Alan Greenspan was the superego of the '90s economy, Cramer was surely its libido. This memoir hopscotches between his trademark hyperbole and a peculiar form of self-abnegation (he never seems happier than when flagellating himself). Cramer's success comes not only from his knowledge of the market, but from his connections, which he began establishing at Harvard. In 1979, while at Harvard Law School, he met Marty Peretz, the wealthy owner of the New Republic, with whom Cramer has since had a long and stormy relationship. Impressed by stock picks Cramer left on his answering machine, Peretz arranged to meet him at a Harvard coffeeshop, "whipped out a check for $500,000 and told me to take it." For a poor law student harboring a yen to play with the big boys, the opportunity was too good to miss. Launched as a money manager, Cramer learned the ropes at Goldman Sachs before striking out on his own at Cramer and Co. The greatest asset of Cramer's company, before she retired to raise their kids, was his wife Karen Backfish, who well deserves the Cramer-bestowed nickname of "the Trading Goddess." In particular, Backfish's composure in the face of Cramer's near collapse during the 1998 market pullback really does read like a visitation from the muse of money. Wall Street-savvy readers will particularly enjoy Cramer's blow-by-blow account of the late-'90s market. The IPO for Cramer's financial e-rag, TheStreet.com, was one of the decade's cultural touchstones. Cramer's unique blend of shrewd analysis, namedropping, and unremitting egotism puts him in the great tradition of American showmen: a P.T. Barnum forthe age of the day trader. A must for market mavens. (N.B.: The publication date for Confessions, originally June 12, was moved up following the admission by HarperCollins that its Trading with the Enemy, by former, now-estranged Cramer assistant Nicholas W. Maier, contained false assertions of insider trading, among other instances of potential libel. Copies of the Maier book have since been pulped and a corrected version published.)

Table of Contents:

1	Early Years	1
2	Goldman	23
3	Money Man	40
4	Building a Hedge Fund	58
5	SmartMoney	66
6	The Birth of TheStreet.com	83
7	Dow Jones Again	99
8	Desai	106
9	The Man with Two Careers	123
10	Media Man	139
11	Cendant	146
12	Berkowitz	155
13	The Hiring of Kevin English	163
14	Crisis in 1998: Part One	169
15	Crisis in 1998: Part Two	195
16	Crisis in 1998: The Trading Goddess Returns	218
17	Inside the IPO: Part One	238
18	Inside the IPO: Part Two	254
19	Media Madness	267
20	Taking Back TheStreet.com	277
21	Repositioning Cramer Berkowitz	283
22	Getting Out	302
23	Confessions of an Ex-Street Addict	316
	Index	320

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Bear-Trap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008

Author: Bill Bamber

Bear, Stearns & Co., a storied Wall Street firm with a maverick reputation had endured many crises throughout its 8S-year history. Nothing however could have prepared the firm's top leadership and pool of talented traders for the sudden death spiral that would leave the firm being taken over for a pittance. In one dramatic showdown with JP Morgan and the Fed this is the story of how fortunes were made and lost. The authors of Bear Trap describe what happened within Bear's walls and on the trading floor, events that resulted in the most sensational financial crisis of our times. They recount in detail the chain of events that led to the downward spiral - from both Bear's point-of-view and from the overall world financial marketplace's. They describe the securities manipulations that served to precipitate the credit crisis-those same securities we see in our IRAs and 401Ks. The authors reveal for the first time how foreign demand of US capital, too, played a role in the Bear's massacre, and they provide an insider's view of the unprecedented actions taken by the Treasury and Federal Reserve to avoid a world-wide financial crisis.