TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says you have to have a plan going in so you don't get forced out.

Some days like Friday you throw out the book and you just say, OK, pick a couple of stocks to defend and let the rest run down without you or scale out of them on the bogus rally you know people will try to mount from an oversold position.

Days like Friday are all about trying not to lose a huge amount of money. They are days where you want to throw a brick at every manager who comes on TV and says, "We don't even look at this stuff because we are long term." You want to throw a brick because these are long-term-sized losses inflicted in a very short time.

Think about it. If I had a nickel for everyone who came on TV and said that the short-term action in Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) (Cramer's Take) or Citigroup (NYSE: C) (Cramer's Take) are "no concern of mine," I would be a trillionaire. Saying stuff like that is simply a way of saying, "I am lying to you or lying to myself, I don't know which," because the odds are not getting better that Fannie Mae will get back to $60 anytime in the long term.

Same with Citigroup or Washington Mutual (NYSE: WM) (Cramer's Take) or Ambac (NYSE: ABK) (Cramer's Take) or MBIA (NYSE: MBI) (Cramer's Take). Maybe this is a "historic" buying opportunity for ABK, but maybe there is no real earnings stream beyond munis, and maybe the muni industry has figured out that the insurance isn't saving them much anyway.

I don't know, but I do know that if you have no perspective on days like Friday, you will be forced out from the pain.

What I do is say, "OK, I am going to take a beating today, which is the price of entry for when stocks -- or at least the stocks that I am picking -- turn around. I hope the price of entry isn't too steep, but I also know that the prices of assets away from here aren't that terrific either." I am saying to myself that when the stocks of companies fall this fast, good things - not bad -- tend to happen to those stocks; companies that are doing well either buy up a lot of stock into the weakness or they just get bought, like Nationwide Financial (NYSE: NFS) (Cramer's Take) this morning.

What I don't do is say, "Why didn't I sell everything Thursday?!" I don't say that because, it, alas, does nothing for you and makes you nothing, so therefore it simply isn't worth saying.

Random musings: I thought the FNM article in Barron's this weekend was much more positive than they did. Pretty much the main way of keeping FNM common from being obliterated is to have the Fed examiners/SEC forbear on the situation until the company rebuilds capital over time. The equity that FNM has may be fictitious, but that's OK -- lots of statements are fictitious -- because the rules allow for fiction short term if it turns into fact later, and the idea that FNM will make more money in the years going forward after all the securitizing from other banks has vanished seems like a reasonable proposition to me. ... Sun Capital Partners is a typical story for the era. They had year after year of great performance and then they stumble. They act confident, they are confident, but are the investors confident? In all my time on Wall Street, I have seen only two articles about whether we'll pull out of a hedge fund: The ones about me after 1998 when I was up 1% vs. double-digit gains in the averages and the articles currently written about Eddie Lampert. ... Reassuring statements by Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) (Cramer's Take) about Countrywide (NYSE: CFC) (Cramer's Take). Super. ... OK, here's a gutsy one you wont see elsewhere: Doug Kass is urging a short of an American icon.

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Jim Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for TheStreet.com's sites and serves as an adviser to the company's CEO. At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in the stocks mentioned.