[HN Gopher] I analyzed 20k recommendations made by Jim Cramer du...
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       I analyzed 20k recommendations made by Jim Cramer during the last 5
       years
        
       Author : prostoalex
       Score  : 51 points
       Date   : 2022-01-05 21:30 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
        
       | spicyusername wrote:
       | > Before you go daytrade on his recommendations you should know
       | that the numbers we are seeing here are heavily influenced by
       | outliers. If you miss out on the top 1% of recommendations (~110
       | stocks out of the 11,000+ buy recommendations he had made), your
       | 1-day return would be -0.062% instead of +0.034.
       | 
       | Pretty big caveat there...
        
         | sjfidsfkds wrote:
         | It's true of many good investment strategies that if you
         | retroactively ignore the best winners (without also ignoring
         | the worst losers) that your measure of performance drops
         | dramatically.
        
       | twobitshifter wrote:
       | Interestingly, the point about outperformance being due to only a
       | few stocks is often true of the broader marker. In 2018 10 stocks
       | contributed more than 100% of the S&P 500 gains.
       | 
       | https://m.investing.com/analysis/6-stocks-responsible-for-ne...
        
       | cheonic8492 wrote:
       | Jim Cramer is an entertainer. Not a financial analyst.
       | 
       | He's a very good entertainer.
        
         | bidirectional wrote:
         | Precisely, this is one of the few fields where actually being
         | able to do it will make you more money than becoming an
         | 'influencer' who talks about the field to other people. The
         | fact he is doing the latter says a lot.
        
       | thedigitalone wrote:
       | He appears to significantly outperform the market if you only
       | hold for 1 day. We need someone to create an ETF that does this
       | and we can all join the fun.
        
         | bhk wrote:
         | > On average, the Buy and Positive mention stocks went up by
         | 0.03 and 0.05% respectively
         | 
         | You would get eaten alive by transaction costs, the bid/ask
         | spread, and, if trading in large quantities, the market's
         | response to your buy & sell orders.
        
           | cecilpl2 wrote:
           | On average the S&P increases by 10% annually. Across 250
           | trading days, it increases by 0.04% daily on average.
           | 
           | So his picks do not beat the market on average.
        
           | blantonl wrote:
           | The more people know about your secret sauce, the less tasty
           | the sauce becomes.
           | 
           | This almost reminds me of the typical /r/WSB stuff that
           | "literally can't go tits-up"
        
       | kfarr wrote:
       | > As the astute among you might have noticed, if you sum up all
       | the stocks used in the analysis it would only come to 18.5k. I
       | removed ~15% of the overall recommendations as either they did
       | not have stock data present in Yahoo Finance/Alpha Vantage or the
       | price data did not match with the one given on the Mad Money
       | website.
       | 
       | That seems like a big caveat. Wouldn't lack of stock price data
       | be an indicator of delisting?
        
         | in3d wrote:
         | Yes, good catch, not taking delisted stocks into account is
         | probably the most common backtesting mistake out there.
        
       | snapetom wrote:
       | That analysis shows his best performance is 1-day
       | recommendations. How is that just not a plain simple pump and
       | dump like crypto traders do?
        
         | gumby wrote:
         | I don't think anyone is claiming that Cramer is making money
         | off others peoples' trading, except very indirectly (this
         | behavior causes more people to watch, which increases
         | advertising value, which increases his bargaining power with
         | his network when negotiating compensation).
         | 
         | I can't see it's illegal, nor do I think it should be. I don't
         | think it's wise for the punters, but I doubt that's terrible.
         | If someone had sunk their life savings into one of these picks
         | and lost their shirt, it would have been widely reported.
        
           | jandrese wrote:
           | Wait, he's not? My assumption is that he always buys the
           | stocks right before recommending them and then dumps them at
           | the close of the next day. Why else would he spend all that
           | time and energy making the TV show?
        
             | beepbooptheory wrote:
             | The TV show pays him, for one thing.
        
             | ralph84 wrote:
             | As corrupt and captured as the SEC is, even they wouldn't
             | let that kind of thing fly.
        
       | gumby wrote:
       | > On average, he was making more than 20 picks per episode of his
       | show [1]. This is a staggering number of picks to be made by one
       | person!
       | 
       | Presumably there's a small team coming up with a list, just as
       | there's a team of writers for a comedy show.
       | 
       | The program is pure entertainment and as far as I can tell
       | unashamedly so. I can't really find fault with that any more than
       | I can with people, say, watching sports on TV.
        
       | delecti wrote:
       | Based on that data, I'd be curious to see a strategy that takes
       | his "negative mentions", waits a day, and then buys and holds for
       | a month.
        
       | Rodeoclash wrote:
       | This might be a bit odd but I'm going to try and link this with
       | Steven Seagal of all people.
       | 
       | Currently Steven Seagal is getting raked over the coals on Reddit
       | due to some of the extraordinary claims he's made about his
       | martial arts abilities, they don't quite line up to our current
       | understanding of what is effective (think, less Aikido and more
       | Ju-Jitsu, at least in the ring).
       | 
       | I think what has happened to Steven Seagal (and here to Jim
       | Cramer) is that we're now in the era where it's possible to
       | (somewhat) easily fact check the claims that you make and prove
       | that they're wrong.
        
         | acdha wrote:
         | I think more than fact checking is the ability to share the
         | results. 30 years ago, you would have needed to be a reporter
         | or known one to have analysis reach that many people.
         | 
         | In the 90s, I thought that was a purely good thing but now I'm
         | wishing we had an in-between version where stuff just shy of
         | time cube has millions of fans.
        
       | pb7 wrote:
       | Jimbo is a TV personality and knows just as little as anyone
       | else. The little positive correlation his recommendations have on
       | a short term basis are from people buying in and pushing the
       | price up. Casual market manipulation.
        
         | hammock wrote:
         | What caused you to come to these conclusions?
         | 
         | edit: Stop downvoting me. I did not realize parent commenter
         | was OP of the reddit post.
        
           | brewdad wrote:
           | "I analyzed 20k recommendations made by Jim Cramer during the
           | last 5 years"
        
           | blantonl wrote:
           | you can literally watch a tick-by-tick chart of a Stock/ETF
           | that is talked about by any of the CNBC talking heads during
           | market hours and watch this occur in real time.
        
           | snapetom wrote:
           | Cramer tells everyone to buy, everyone buys. Price goes up,
           | then smart people cash out in the profit taking. It doesn't
           | matter what the recommendation is after that buy. Cramer can
           | tell you to sit in a dark closet and fart for the rest of the
           | week. He's successfully driven the price up on a very short
           | term basis, and those that have caught on make easy money.
        
           | cols wrote:
           | This is a well known effect.
           | 
           | https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cramerbounce.asp
        
       | Traster wrote:
       | I do think that limiting yourself to 1 day, 1 week, 1 month
       | horizons is... limiting. Making predictions on that horizon is
       | essentially predicting events (earnings, mergers etc.) and market
       | dynamics. For example, I've worked at a public company who _I
       | knew_ was in trouble from an engineering perspective. I left,
       | over the 3 years before, and 3 years after I left, the stock
       | performed very well. So in terms of stock market predictions, it
       | 's not about knowing he underlying performance of the business.
       | It also lends itself to letting Cramer market his own homework -
       | did the stock go up due to his influence for example? Could be
       | the case for smaller cap stocks, and particularly over a 1 day
       | horizon.
       | 
       | It's also rather comical that he's right a little over 50% of the
       | time when making a positive prediction and a little less than 50%
       | of the time when making a negative. Or to put it another way, the
       | stock market goes up -so when you predict it goes up, you're
       | generally right.
        
       | oa335 wrote:
       | I read a similar analysis on Cramer's picks in 2007. IIRC on
       | average There was a transient increase (lasting several days) in
       | the stocks he recommended...however sometimes the increase would
       | begin several hours before his show aired. Also the magnitude of
       | the effects scaled negatively with market cap of the stock (small
       | caps moved more).
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-05 23:00 UTC)