Barron's cover story on Jim Cramer this week is a perfect August cover: beach reading about whether Cramer is a good stock picker.
Cramer and I went to college together and I was a board member at TheStreet.com (NASDAQ: TSCM), so I am not unfamiliar with Jim's career.
The Barron's piece starts out by saying the viewer of Cramer's show Mad Money would only have made 12% on Cramer's picks over the last two years. The magazine uses a firm called YourMoneyWatch to determine that. It tracks Cramer's stocks from when he tells viewers to buy them up until he says that they are "sells." In a chart, Barron's shows Cramer's performance against the two year advances of the Dow at 22% and the S&P at 16%.
Cramer has a wide following. His Mad Money show has 138,000 viewing homes according to Nielsen. Several hundred thousand more people read him through products at TheStreet. He is written about in the press several times a month, so Cramer is almost certainly the most widely followed stock guru in the country.
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