i'm jim cramer and welcome to my world. you need to get in the game. firms are going to go out of business and he's nuts! they're nuts! they know nothing! i always like to say there's a bull market somewhere -- "mad money," you can't afford to miss it. hey, i'm cramer. welcome to "mad money," welcome to cramerica. other people want to make friends, i just want more quarters like this one. my job is not just to entertain but also to teach and educate. so call me at 1-800-743-cnbc. there's some things i've been keeping from you. it's not tear. tonight i'm going to do something about it. tonight i'm going to tell you who i am and how i got here.

that plus an avatar and 140 characters pretty much sums up everyone these days. i want you to know more about me than that. although it did take me two years to figure out avatar was not a movie and hash talking is not a sign. remember, in the end, this is cramerica. in short, i'm going to give you the invest in cramer guide book, the skinny on how i learned to be a good investor and how i continue to learn every day so i can help you become better than i've ever been and better than i ever will be. my love of stocks didn't begin after high school. my love started back in forth grade. that's right, fourth grade. i was a phillies fan.

my dad would bring home the largest paper in the world at that time. if i could go back in time, i would have somehow made it so i was a yankee fan. we were only 89 miles south of new york because no one in his right mind would choose to affiliate himself with a team that has the largest number of losses in all of sporting history. i was a curious kid. there was always this solid chunk of the paper that seemed inpenetrable to me. it was the business section. they were the other tables, different from the batting average tables and box scores i would scrutinize. when you read them from left to right, they made he no sense to me. open, range, close, open. what are these strange things? why did they matter? occasionally, i would hear my dad get mad. buy, buy, buy, buy. >> when he heard prices that were on the radio.

he would particularly get upset when i heard the national video on the radio and how it went identity. i didn't know what national video did and why it went out. i don't know if pop knew, either, weight did. i don't know. but i know it made his furious, and i wanted to find out more about these things that made him react with such furry. so he sat me down and told me each of those lines represented the performance of a stock of a different company on a different day. the range was how low and how high it traded during the day and the close was how much it was worth when trading finished for the day. it fascinated for me. how could there be so many companies? what the heck did it mean to trade in ranges and how did it close? they wanted to buy them so they could make money frr this increases. frankly, this struck me as down right silly. i told him when i was looking at this baseball tables, who was hot.

who would go down. he said it was pretty much the same thing in stocks, that you studied the companies like you studied the players. some players were doing okay. some were hot as a pistol and some were duds. i said i wanted to try to figure out which were going to go higher just like everyone else was trying to figure it out. i wanted to know if i can learn something following the ranges and reading the tables. he said why didn't you try? it seemed in my house the radio was always on. pop put the tv on for dinner. we always watched the news while eating. i hated it because most of the news is about the war. even when i was 9 years old, my mom was worried that i might have to go to vietnam. fortunately the war was winding down at the time i got my draft number. it was a high one. but right after the world news on the radio or tv, they always mentioned the dow jones industrial average. they either talked or showed the most active stocks and then the ones that did the best or the worst. national video was all from the worst list, i discovered, hence the anger.

what i did was write the names down that i heard and i tracked them. i kept them in this ledger, this ledger that i still have. you can see it. look at this. how did klm go out? there's mgm. sweet row xerox, polaroid. i would just go over each one each day and put them down. there's a winner. it was a game. mgm. anyway, so it was terrific. i was just trying to figure out the next move of a stock, even if all i really knew was, frankly, the name continental or the name rca. whatever. most of them were defense stocks. they went up a lot in tandem with the war i heard about. i followed those and a bunch of others. after a year i thought, this was a cool game. cool game imaginable. i wanted to introduce this to my fifth grade class, and so i did. i invited everyone to play so they could find the stocks that went up the next week.

the darnedest thing happened later, the minnesota mining and manufacturing company in the philadelphia area selling tape, ribbon that bowed easily. that was when you had to make your own bows. right about fifth grade, pop came home with a new line of 3m products that he was selling. it was called the bookshelf games. that's right. they got into what's known as 3m book shelf games. he said perhaps i wanted to learn more about how the stock market worked and stocks and bonds of which i am fortunate enough to have gotten an honest to god real copy right here courtesy of george sanisus who gave it to me for the holidays. what a cool game. this was so great. i almost cried when i saw this. i loved the game so much. i think that's a hot on one,

shady brooks development, i think justin one of our camera people owns that one. tri city. i don't know. maybe he got a deal on that. anyway, i asked the ceo to bring these back. i don't know if he will. but the point i mention this is from my own mixture of games, stocks and bonds is that stocks are fascinating enough. i promise you to get your kids started on them right now. particularly when you have games like stocks and bonds. it's easier than ever. pick stocks. maybe not all defense companies. have them track the companies. guess what they'll do over a period of time. here is the bottom line. get them started early. and you know what? maybe they'll play for life. alas, the stock market is a long-term contest. and one i think the earlier you get in, let's just say okay, the more you can win.

let's go to loretta in arizona, please. loret loretta. >> hi, captain cramer. a big sunny booyah to you from phoenix, arizona. >> love phoenix. what's up? >> caller: what steps should a company take when they thought was a solid monthly dividend suffers a steep drop in price and a 50% dividend reduction? hold them or fold them? >> a lot of the monthly ones are oil related. if oil comes back, i think you will have sold at the bottom. freeport a few years back cut its dividend. it turned out the to be the exact spot. you know what? don't sell it. do some work. it might just go be the actual bottom. i think that's what you have to be thinking of. john in illinois. john. >> caller: windy city booyah to you, cramer. >> nice. what's up? >> caller: thanks for all you do for us and thanks especially for

helping me get my son through colorado state university. >> congratulations to him and i want to thank my staff for helping your son because it's a team effort here to make things great. how can i help? >> here is my question. i got an e-mail from one of my holdings and they said they were going to do a five to one stock reverse. i know what a reverse is, but my question is, the fact that it's five to one, is that a red flag and should i get out or is that not something to be concerned about? >> the damage is probably done if you're doing a five to one. in other words, what's happened is the stock has gone down so low that people think it's not investable. if the fundamentals aren't any good, it's going to go back to one. i suggest you hold to see how it initially goes. if the company is doing poorly, it doesn't matter, sell, sell, sell. irving in nevada, irving. >> caller: hello. the >> you got me, it's cramer. go ahead. >> caller: look, i'm irving from

las vegas. and because of you, and the wonderful things you've been doing for people and for me, i got into the stock market more or less at the age of 90. >> fantastic, sir. fantastic. isn't it the greatest? don't you lover it? >> caller: because i've been listening to you for many careers, not doing anything, but at the age of 90 -- i'm 92 now. >> you're just getting started. you've got a couple of bull markets maybe bear market heavy. what's up? >> which way is the better to buy stock, preferred or common? >> preferreds, actually. i happen to like the bank preferreds. they were terrific. a lot of times, you have to figure out what is out of step? a lot of the preferred turn out to be perfect. common has the more upside. i like to follow the common stocks. i give you a figure, better reward, but, of course, more risk.

but i think you're doing terrifically. tonight i'm sharing all my investing memories and give you the lessons that i have learned. my first pearl of wisdom, hey, why not get them started really early? keep the kids about investing. it's a lifelong skill. mad money will be right back. >> announcer: don't miss a second of mad money. follow@jimcramer on twitter. have a question? tweet cramer, #madtweets. send jim an e-mail to madmoney@cnbc.com. give us a call 1-800-743-cnbc. miss something? head to madmoney.cnbc.com.

to build your future -- >> caller: happy booyah to you. >> caller: booyah. thanks a lot for your passion for stocks. matd money does work for a small investor like me. >> mad money and making me money for college. jim booyah, i love you. >> how many other shows have kids calling in and saying booyah? >> announcer: one booyah at a time.

mad money with jim cramer. weeknights at 6:00 and 11:00 on cnbc. welcome back to a bizarrely special mad money where i am trying to teach you life lessons and investing in my life. i am not a dollar sign represented by a man or a stock symbol for that matter. ticker jim. i have stumbled around the stock market long enough to learn a thing or two. tonight you're getting some of that wisdom from the school of hard knocks. that is what i attended when it came to stocks. you're getting the on tv version right here right now. we covered how i first got involved, my fourth agreed ledger obsessed with tracking the stock market. the greatest game, not monopoly, but stocks and bonds with its stock certificates and its game board and is all the cool do dads. about what would send a stock higher? don't you love that? you keep track.

you love that, you keep track? i left the stock market games behind me by the time i got to middle school. we called it junior high back then. my obsession became sports, i was the second fastest guy in the school forever, so i ran track. then, of course, girls. more lucid than stocks. i couldn't win for losing, but that's a different show. however, my father did engrain in me the desire to save. early on, i learned even in high school, i saved even as i bused tables at the old block and cleaver, which we called the block and cleavage because we were hilariously stupid back then. then ultimately graduating into selling ice cream. hey, ice cream, vanilla and chocolate. quickly, i learned the value of marketing power. specifically cornering the pocket. and i paid people to give me the exclusive right to sell ice cream, hey, chocolate, on the 600 and 700 level.

can you imagine how many money could be made if you had the only franchise, the whole upper deck? even for a team as horrible as the phillies back then? i made a fortune, except the one time they gave me strawberry ice cream, talk about having to run from a customer after you sold that stuff. when steve carlton pitched. when lefty was on the mound, he pitched so quickly and got players out so fast that i would get stuck with unsold ice cream which i had to buy from the company before selling it and i would take a real beating. talk about learning how business worked. the shelf life on ice cream after the ninth inning on a hot july night is about as short as short can be. at the ballpark, people called me to get my attention to buy ice cream and frankly, i loved it. i never forgot the monitors. hey, bud. chip. i mean, partner. anyway, i made a ton of money and from the advice of my partner i opened up an account with fidelity. with the miguel magellan fund. still there. it was the top mutual fund company of its time. i should be referring you to

those all the time. i didn't save enough when i got to college. the money paid was work study anyway and it went toward my tuition, room and board. but when i got out of college, after a lot of attempts to get accepted in the newspaper business and i got rejected many times, i landed a position as a general times reporter making $156 a week. i still keep a tattered pay stub from those days in my wallet to remind me how hard it was when i got started. nevertheless, i contributed a few dollars away when i could. then i applied at the now defect los angeles reporter. not long after my sojourn in los angeles, i found a bungalow apartment in the fairfax district. pretty sketchy. around the corner tr pioneer chicken way too expensive for me to go to.

at the time, i was assigned a story in san diego. a horrible school shooting. and when i returned, everything was gone. everything i had was gone. so it began, my terrible but somewhat thrilling six months of living in my car, basically trying to get by. the only upside being when you net a woman, it was pretty to end with the query your place or mine. i knew the ultimate goal was to save enough to get an apartment. people would take me in now and then so i could get a shower, clean, change. but you know what? i never stopped saving. i remember cashing my paycheck every other week and writing a check to fidelity magellan fund. how poor was i? yet still putting money away. when i ultimately, of course, got mononeucleosis. then the jaundice liver.

a yellow spot like one of those projections on the summit, i had no health care, no branch where i was last stationed when the company americamercifully put me road so i could -- expenses and day-to-day issues. i had to go to a migrant farm clinic, i still put money away. which by the way, i had a doctor who was pretty much one of the best i ever had. the up shot of investing when you're living in your car, amazingly, giving money to the best stock picker of all time, i managed to gather up 35 years later to put enough to way to teach. money ultimately went into six figures. i stopped putting money into that fund years ago, but through the power of compounding, made a ton of money. i never touched it. i just let it build. i think the take away here is what i want you to do is save no matter what. no matter what. obviously, the early the best through thick and thin.

when cnbc has all those managers on, you don't have enough time to handle your own stock portfolio. you can only buy one or two stocks. send the money in, as little or as much as you can. if i can still send those checks to the fidelly miguelan fund when i was living in the back of my car, the most down and out that you can be in this country, you can put away from money, too. stay with cramer. let's go to kentucky. >> how about a big hillbilly ba ba ba booyah. >> a hillbilly booyah, holy cow. >> here is a big los angeles bing bing bing bing ching ching ching booyah. >> a bit stanton island booyah. >> boston. >> nashville. >> michigan. >> georgia. >> florida. >> alaska. >> booyahs come from all across america. let cramer help you channel yours. "mad money" with jim cramer. week nights on cnbc.

we're riding the magical money mystery tour. and i'm giving you the life lessons i have learned the hard way through decades of stock investing. i told you first about how to get your kids started early. okay. and then i told you about how nothing should ever stop you from investing if i could invest while living in the back seat of my 1977 ford fairmont. i know you can, too. right now, i want to tell you about how i got started in individual stock picking, something you know i love and still believe. even in periods of on pain and chicanery. it's still totally worthwhile if not lucrative and, yes, it is the reason i believe you watch, that is, unless you love the funny outfits that i occasionally don and the streams of conscious references

and the outrageous -- courtesy of when i used to have a radio show called "real money." if you were picking stocks playing with real money, not just with the ledger or with the game stocks and bonds, you need an account. well, i got started in 1979. there was no such thing an an online account. i had my money with fidelity. so i chose to put my individual stock account there. when i first started, i didn't know where to look for ideas. i started with forbes. people with forbes, do not take this personally. i read this article about a terrific orange grower in florida and it seemed to be compelling. so i bought ten areas of it for $9. a week later, a frost hit. wiped out the entire crop. my investment was cut in half. i was devastated, but not defeated. i sold it out, took the capital and bought seven shares of bobby brooks, a clothing outfit i had heard of which, again, forbes said could be a terrific buy. i ever had never heard of it. almost immediately, they reported a bad quarter and i in

money havd again. fortunately, i had a decent job at a magazine called "american lawyer" which i had just started making 40gs. i was living at a less than swank studio in manhattan, the cheap $40 a month rent, albeit twice if rent for a beautiful one bedroom rent in tallahassee, and a heck of a lot more than the back seat of a car allowed me to replenish my stock coffers. i was on the road quite a bit back then. researching in kentucky, i said a particularly hard night on the town, so to speak. i fell in love with a breakfast at bob evans farms. when i went back home, i visited the huge fabulous new york manhattan new york public library and devoured everything i could about bob evans farms. they had magazines with articles, microfiche of s.e.c. followings. okay, they were four months old, but take it when you get get it. it allowed me to compare bobe with other restaurants in the industry. i knew i had a good one. i bought 20 shares. the stock went up immediately on a good quarter and the stock split. and i figured out the good component of investing, know

what you own. like it, even. what did i know about growing oranges? who knew about women's fashion? but a good plate of scrambled eggs and sausages served in an attractive setting, a company that i found had a long tradition of good service and nice growth plans to expand in the midwest? that was for me. next up, sts technologies, old standard press steel. why sps? because a buddy of mine from high school catching up can me told me, listen, jim, if you're in the gym, they were hiring liked ma at sps. he said sps is paying good money. i had a job. back to the library for more research, solid company, no debt. it doubled not long after and i caught the bug for good. 23 years later, sps would be acquired by precision cast parts.

preeminent supplier to aircraftmakers around the globe. so now i'm figuring it out. the best investment ideas do want come from these magazines. they come from what you know. when you meld that information with information from public sources, even if they are as late and as hard a source as taking a trip to the new york public library that's supposed to be working, that's good enough. now, i didn't like the random way i was making money. a friend from home with a lucky call available with jobs available, a hearty breakfast at bob evans farms, there has to be a more methodical way, don't you think? and then it hit me. look around at work. at the time i was covering mergers and acquisitions. profiling some deals that were on, it seemed that every other deal was in the oil patch. one after another, small to mid sized oil companies were waiting to be acquired. i went back to the public library, took out some edition

of value lines and checked out the pages devoted to oil companies. i then referenced them with other research, magazine articles to find out which ones would be acquired without problems, either because they were public without a family owning them or because they seemed to fit the same parameters that other deals i was reading about. i set on a deal called natomis. i almost doubled my money. if i want to buy takeovers, buy companies that would do well on their own but was undermanaged. that meant another oil company with bigger scale could do more with natomis, which was cheaper than it should be if it simply got rid of the management. as much as i had hit some winners, though, i was distraught that i had given up the ghost of those first few trades i mentioned. mostly aqueduct. starting to take a hit. i had learn how to handicap by reading the books of andy wire. i was addicted to the track.

he wrote two books. they might be the second best investment books to keep disciplined, how do i identify the best thoroughbreds to bet on, going out to the tracks where the information was less well known and, please, don't bet willy-nilly on every horse in each race because you're looking for something to do. find the ones with the payoff, bet sure, big, cut your losses if you're having a bad run. think about it, every one of these lessons could be applied to the stock market. you can take a huge swing when you know when you're doing. don't just gamble for the stocks for the excitement identity. most important, be disciplined. after five years of professional journalism, i decided to hang it up and go back to law school. the good news? i saved enough to pay for my first year all through the stock market. and by the way, let's be clear, an index fund would have made me nothing, nothing at all. here is the bottom line. if you want to go and get

started, go small. invest in what you know. research it intensely. back then, i got old data from the public library. now it's as simple as a key stroke and the information is free, ubiquitous. including up to the minute analysts, conference calls that i tell you are musts if you're going to know what you are doing. simple? no. lucrative? you bet it is. kiann in new york. >> hi, jim bow. >> yo. >> caller: general question for you the. what could be considered a good rate of return on investment and does it differ depending on asset class? >> i think you're measured against spawns. if you get get a good tax bet on it, in other words, like you have a reduced tax on the dividends or the capital gains, you're going to do real well. if you look, the ten year or measure against the 30 years, say 3, 3 1/2, 4, if you can get 6%, 7%, 8%, you are doing great. john in north carolina, john. hey, john. >> caller: hey, what's gone on,

jim? >> not much. how about you? >> caller: doing good. so i'm new to the market. >> okay. >> caller: and i've been watching the show and reading the mad money book, which has been very helpful. >> thank you. >> caller: my question is, when i'm doing valuations for companies and i'm calculated ppgs, which eps number should i use and which growth percentage should i use? is it previous quarter or previous year or estimates -- >> okay. when you're doing the price earnings ratios, i always like to look at the forward, in other words, income year. i don't like to look at historic because that doesn't make it. you have to go and get the estimates. you get them on yoo-hoo. that's what you use again and that's how you figure out the peg ratio and which a stock is cheap or not. want to get started? look for things you know and research it until you can't research it any more. you're surrounded now by information. use it. stick around. i've got more or lessons from my

investing experience coming right up. stay with cramer. ♪

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tonight, i have taking you through the importance of getting started early. and saving no matter what. i have shown you how to spot winners, stay away from losers and stay disciplined all through the actual life changes. now i'm going to give you a sense of how you can become a trader if you want to. okay? and you want to be a good one. this show has changed from time and time again. it's been years that it's been

on. there are more obstacles to trading than investing these days. you have to watch your position like a hawk where it's hard to do your job and follow the market. there's so many different products allowing hedge funds to move around like they're stocks. there's some advantages you have now that you sure didn't have when i started trading in 19811. first, commission res so, so much lower, so you can get in and is out without much friction and with much more after commission profit. second information is, in your personal computer or even your smartphone, third, trading slightly faster. when i was at kraft within i had to use pay phones, no cell. you often had to wait while some kid chatted endliless and aimlessly. at the same time, i had to go with what i knew. i knew individual stocks. for all of the stories about harvard law, including the movie

paper chase, i can tell you that there was a ton of downtime and a real good business library nearby as well as up to date microfiche, all things i considered i possessed probably the best publicly available information around harvard law. the first thing i decided to do was to work on one trading idea per week. my reasoning was pretty simple. you can't be all over the map if you were doing this as a hobby. i discarded all the of ideas looking for something that had catalysts or stocks that could rally based on the other parts of the paper. a brokerage report might discuss a new oil find. i wrote a newsletter called mr.

bullish which actually i only mailed to my parents. it came out once a week. no buying of anything that didn't have an exit strategy from the moment i put it on. an important lesson made disciplined by a written thesis before i pulled the trigger. when you trade, trade with confidence. you want to trade with confidence? ask yourself, would you be willing to put a stock recommendation on your voice mail, on your answering machine and updata it every week? hi, this is jim cramer. i'm not here right now but i like montu 32 for the week. yeah, i actually did that, every single week. i had that level of conviction about my pick of the week, which

was incredibly important to posses. you have to have that. i was putting my money where my mouth was and managed to get augment the winnings with work i was able to get with freelance work from the "new york times" and some legal work from a professor. it wasn't long after that that marty parrish, a publisher from new york magazine, a professor at harvard tried to get ahold of me. tried to get me to write a piece. they were all successful trades of the week and he told me to meet me at a coffee house nearby. when i did, he wanted to give me $500,000 to manage. he said he had confidence in me. shortly after, he gave me a check for $500,000. which by the way was real money back then. i ran down to fidelity and set up to work trading. almost immediately i lost a ton of it. my mistake? a man has to know his own limitations. you can't trade a huge chunk of money at once. you can't put it all to work at once. knowing that you'd be done,

whether at work or not, i violated my own rules and i had blown it. i confessed to marty my sins and said you should take your money back. instead, he gave me more money. i slowly by surely made it back while also paper invested a more active and truly trading portfolio. that would become the beginning of my actual professional trading career and i ended up making a lot more money than anybody ever thought you could. here is the bottom line. if you're going to trade, make sure you have a catalyst where there was an exit point going to happen. you need conviction and you have to ask yourself, would you be willing for the world to hear hi, it's me, it's not here right now, but i want you to take a swing at disney ahead of the big

analyst meeting? give it a try. start small. stay with cramer. nobody has more passion about the market than i am. >> i wanted to thank you. you have saved my retirement. >> you are why i come out here and do this show. thank you so much. >> the stuff you're doing for all of us is so important and i want to say thank you. >> my husband and i watch your show every day. >> put cramer's 30 plus years of experience to work for you. mad money, week nights on cnbc.

tonight, you're following the early stages of my own career, the education of a modern portfolio willing. and i'm taking you through the importance of starting investing early. the need to stick with putting away money no matter what. the imperative of knowing what you own and the discipline of what it means to be a good trader. now we're up to the professional grade, my time when i started at goldman sachs.

i had been courted by goldman sachs for three years before i got a job this the security sales department. helping individuals and small institutions manage their money. but tonight's show, like every show, is about learning how to trade and invest. my study with me at the university of hard knocks. so i will dispense with the anecdotes. first, that's where i began understanding the process of actually making money. money management, the ability to build a portfolio from the ground up. i had the best teachers in the world. lee cooperman put on a new investment clinic each day. but you know who i really learned from? my customers. chiefly wealthy individuals from all walks of life. it was at goldman that i learned something that these days can't be as understood. that is individuals actively beat the market. i had nondiscretionary accounts, meaning i wasn't allowed to invest anyone else's money with

my own ideas unless i could win them over to make the purchase. that's where i made commissions. i was able to articulate that stock's idea in a way that made sense. you had to know your stuff. i often asked the buyers whether they knew enough about their stocks when they wanted to buy on their own. i wanted them to be as educated as they could about the securities they were buying. i knew if they went up, it would be their idea and if the stock went down, they would be mine. just human nature. what else did i learn? how about humility?

it was at goldman sachs that i first figured out how humbling it could be. it just started a year and a half before i got hired. but when one of your ideas went against you, you had to get on the horn and explain either why the person should buy more or whether they had to cut their losses, kind of like what we hear in the lightning round every night, isn't it? that's why we always have to recognize how fallible investments could be and what to do when stocks go against you. i also learned how to cut your losses and when to cut those losses. i had to learn the hard way. most of my clients were business people who didn't know a lot about stocks. they had been entrepreneurs, investors, that kind of thing. i had a real cantankerous client. i had to work hard to get the guy, try to win him over for ages. i told him i would be judicious. he said he didn't want trade. he only wanted long-term investments. at the time, i liked kimberly clark. i told him i thought this would

be great. he agreed. almost immediately it went up eight points. i had a winner. so i called him and i said, bob, incident to ring the register and sell the shares of kimberly clark. i thought he'd thank me. but he was furious. he told me i said kimberly clark was great for the long-term. then he questioned my integrity, wanted to know if i was trying to churn him, a horrible charge meaning i was just trying to generate commissions off the guy. i was scorched. but he did treat me a great lesson. if you don't want to turn a trade into an investment because that's usually a sign that use basing a loss and trying to cement why you're in it. you don't want to turn an investment into a trade. if you have a good one, let it run for heaven's sakes.

kimberly ultimately doubled and i was vindicated. a lot of my business involved contacting the people who had just come into a great deal of cash. they tend to be rather unsophisticated about the cash management. i regarded my first job as listening to their needs, trying to figure out what they wanted. they were conservative? okay. were they aggressive? did they want capital appreciation? i tried to get to know them and urge them to try to get to know themselves and the risk levels of tolerance. how about dividends? do you want to participate in new issues? do you want to try to hit it out of the park with your capital? i'll try to teach you what to know yourself. when i first got to goldman sachs, i tried to get to oils, the oil seblther. you have to understand those

were different days. you could have them double and double again in very different times. there are still humans place necessary this country that no one has discovered oil in yet. the families wanted oils, i wanted oils. every day seemed like a great day in the oil patch. services, drillers, you name it. some global tensions had jacked up the price. the next thing you know, the bull morphed into a bear. i had understood first hand the contest of diversification. i never again intentionally avoid diversification. here is the bottom line. i learned the core principles of investing, finding solid ideas to create long-term wealth in a way that benefits the customer. all of my investors consistently beat the market on ways of their own aided by people like me who worked with them to consciously

put a plan into action. mad money is back after the break.

our tour of the early lessons of my life's journey into the market is drawing to an end. you followed my love affair with stocks. show the importance of getting started early in investing. do you live with me with my 22 caliber pistol in the back of a car? saw me invested in mutual fund no matter what the circumstances to understand the need for me to save no matter what. you learned how to find a good idea, how to research them and saw them cold. you saw is discipline needed for good home gamer trading and you stumbled along with me to find the goodness of long-term investing. i hope you've been able to take away a ton of information, been able to glean some insights from my mistakes. best of all, i want to wish you success in trading and investing and to remind you when you hear from the great beards that say you can't make money at home and have to give the money to a professional or index fund, that the story of my life at every turn is very much the opposite,

and that you can make money in different ways with managers and brokers and, yes, by yourself. stick with cramer.