TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says just because an idea isn't 'yours' doesn't mean it can't make you money.

Sometimes when you are thinking the correction is shallow, you cling to totems. While the close last night was terrible, the moment I read that Doug was covering his rental shorts, I said, "Time to put some cash to work" -- cash that we had raised in Action Alerts PLUS the last two weeks as part of our disciplined scale-into-strength methodology.

There are so many ways to try to divine what is going to happen in the market. My favorite, though, is to find out who was smart enough to be in the right direction for the vicious move up or down and see what he is doing.

I am not sure that Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) will make it through the month as public companies. Barron's quoted an anonymous senior official -- who sounds an awful lot like Hank Paulson to me -- that unless Fannie and Freddie could raise at least $10 billion each, the government would bail them out while wiping out common shareholders and eliminating the preferred dividend. Since then, investors have been dumping shares of Fannie and Freddie like there's no tomorrow.

Who wins and who loses if Fannie and Freddie's shareholders are wiped out? As I said on CNBC's Power Lunch this afternoon, the winners are investors who shorted Fannie and Freddie years ago and are now reaping enormous profits. I also think that some Wall Street investment banks will win big as they get the job of selling off Fannie and Freddie's pieces. The losers are their biggest common and preferred shareholders -- including some well known mutual funds.

The winners are:

• Jim Rogers, Rogers Holdings - Rogers originally shorted Freddie and Fannie in March 2006 and appeared on Bloomberg on November 20, 2007 to discuss why he did it and where he thought their stocks would go.
• Doug Noland, Prudent Bear - As I posted, since the late 1990s, Noland's research has concluded that Freddie and Fannie would "shudder" when the US credit bubble eventually burst. Noland has profited from the short bets he made -- but he says it is emotionally painful to watch them fail.

Bill Miller, the famed Legg Mason fund manager, was on television last week. He said he is long on housing stocks.

In Barron's Up and Down Wall Street column (subscription required), Doug Kass of Seabreeze Partners said he was short housing stocks - no big surprise there. Kass referred to order cancellation as the reasoning for his bearishness.

Typically, publicly traded homebuilders have cancellation rates of 15% of orders. However, that number has jumped considerably. Cancellation rates of publicly traded homebuilders:

• Centex (NYSE: CTX) - 37%
• DR Horton (NYSE: DHI) - 40%
• KB Homes (NYSE: KBH) - 53%
• Lennar (NYSE: LEN) - 31%
• Pulte Homes (NYSE: PHM) - 36%
• Beazer (NYSE: BZH) - 57%
• Hovnanian (NYSE: HOV) - 35%
• MDC Holdings (NYSE: MDC) - 49%
• Standard Pacific (NYSE: SPF) - 50%

These numbers (from the Barron's article) are so bad that the worst might be unfolding right now.

TheFly's advice, Miller tends to be too early and Kass is often too negative when the worst is already priced in the stocks. I'd say, start following these stocks again, expecting a bottom in the spring and early summer.

The most recent rally is mostly from an oversold condition. I'd wait for another correction and see where the industry fundamentals stand.

Earlier today, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS) reported that it raked in a whopping $9.34 billion in 2006, a record-high in the history of organized finance. The company plans to pay out $16.5 billion of that to its employees, to the tune of $622,000 per person. Goldman's fiscal fourth quarter saw profits increase 93% year-over-year, to $3.16 billion, or $6.59 per share, well above the consensus estimate of $6.36. (You can read more about the numbers here.)

Goldman's record year could signal similar results from the other investment banks set to announce their earnings over the next two weeks, and the Times article goes on to describe the incredible economic boost these numbers will give downtown Manhattan. Purveyors of high-end goods and services are rubbing their hands for a very merry holiday season.

This news is even more striking when you consider that Doug Kass over at TheStreet.com lists Goldman going private as a possible (if unlikely) surprise for 2007. You have to give credit where credit is due: If Goldman is set to leave us, it sure went out with a bang.