>> my mission is simple, so make you money. i'm here to level the playing field for all investors. there's always a bull market somewhere and i promise to help you find it. mad money starts now. hey i'm cramer. welcome to mad money. welcome to cramerica. my job is to teach and coach you. call me at 1-800-743-cnbc. we live in a confusing time for the stock market. there's always somebody telling you to do exactly the opposite of what you should be doing and

they tell you to do the wrong thing with conviction. sometimes they sound so super intelligent, much smarter than i sound, right? let's face that. but here on mad money we're not about sounding smart. if we were, i probably wouldn't have so many sound effects. we're about trying to get it right. what to buy, what to sell, what direction the market is headed. you get these things right and it's a lot easier to make money in any market. in all of my 30 years plus in the investing business have to tell you the easiest way to get it right is by working hard and being as rigorous as possible. there's no trick. there's no five simple rules that would make you a millionaire overnight. but if you do the work, then you just might learn something that will make you a better investor. in my world, a better investor is one that makes more money than the other guy. that's the goal. for the better part of a decade i have been running my own

charitable trust. with the help of my terrific research director, cnbc contributor and because i play with an open hand. we explain every single move the trust makes before it makes it which means i have years and years of documentation showing where i went wrong and where i went right. as part of the research for my latest book, get rich carefully, i went back on every single trade from the last five years to analyze what worked and what didn't. do you know what, i got a treasure trove of valuable information. i want to take you through some of the most important information i picked up going through the trust. i advise you to do the same thing with your own trading history. you can learn a lot by going over all of your past decisions. know yourself. and you need not fear the result of 100 battles. so let's get started. you notice that something is

really counter intuitive. sometimes the best time to buy the stock is right after the analysts cut their estimates for the underlying company. aren't we supposed to be buying prizes? one of the best investments was made in march of 2009 when it had been going down and down and down for weeks on end. i had what looked to be a particularly bad quarter. oh, the analysts, they all turned bearish at once after cat's business took more hits and orders seemed to be cancelled every single day. remember this was right at the depths of the great recession. when caterpillar reported the quarter turned out to be uglier than the analysts predicted. some slashed their estimates taking them down as much as 50%. can you imagine? but, and this is important, cat's stock barely reacted to

the bad news falling only slightly and instantly stabilizing and returning to where it was when the earnings announcement was issued. do you know what that is? the sign that you're looking at a bottom. right then cat was screaming look at me, look at me. all the bad news is out in me. the worst is over. calling bottoms yourself can be dangerous and sometimes the market will call the bottom for you and that's exactly what happened with caterpillar when it reported the awful numbers. the stocks barely batted an eyelash and bingo, a bottom was formed. it may seem counter intuitive to buy a stock after the estimates have been slashed. but when you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense. you want to wait until the bad news is totally baked into the share price. then you can build a position that might lead to them down the road. sure enough, caterpillar roared

from the perch for months on end as business improved and analysts raised their estimates from what turned out to be the levels that were far too low. yet the big money men all made a huge amount of money because they bought an estimate cut. not an estimate boot but a cut because the earnings had troughed. and anybody could have caught this move by watching how the stock didn't get crush like you would expect after the hideous quarter and last barrage of estimate cuts. some of you may be saying that's a once in a lifetime situation. well let me give you a more reasonable example. j.p. morgan. remember the trader that caused the bank to lose $16 million? the stock kept going lower in sync with the estimate cuts and then one day the new york times reported it might total as much

as 9 billion and several of the firms following the stocks slashed their estimates to match that new york times figure. however just like caterpillar, j.p. morgan's stock didn't get hit. instead it flat lined. and then it stopped ever so slightly when the news broke. just like with cat the stock was telling you that the estimates had come down too far. sure enough, after we learned that jp's losses were not 9 billion. they were contained at 6 billion, and that was the moment you had to buy. the stock was down to $31 over the previous month and if you bought it right after that round of number cuts, you caught an immense rally. 31 goes to 50 almost in a straight line over the next 12 months. and that, my friends, is a 61% gain. here's the bottom line. do you want to know the single most reliable sign that the

stock is bottoming, you need to wait for the moment that the estimates are so low that they can finally, at last be beaten. lucky for you the market will almost always tell you when that happens as we saw in 2012. when the estimates get slashed but the stock doesn't go lower, that's the market screaming that a bottom is probably at hand. can i go to leo in louisiana, please? leo. >> caller: hey, jim, look. we really appreciate you. you helped me the last couple of years recoop the thousands that my so-called professional broker lost for me. >> thank you for those kind words. we go at it every day helping you. thank you. >> caller: you're also helping me make sure i have a fund set aside for my granddaughter's college. but what's the deal with after hours trading and why are we cut out from that? >> it's not a bad thing. so often after hours trading is misdirection placed. you know how he runs it, it's a

read option play. i feel very strongly that it's just a fake out city. it's a wild west. i don't want you there. now, you can. you can certainly do it. but why trade on no information. that's just guessing. we don't guess on mad money but thank you for the kind comments and great about your granddaughter and the trust. can i go to dave in north carolina. >> caller: booyah jim. how are you doing. >> good. >> caller: i like watching your show. we all watch it. thank you for all of your help and the staff. >> thank you. that's fabulous. >> caller: quick question, this u.s. air american airline merger, what is an investor to look for to see about the company being profitable or not with merging or any signs or stuff like that? >> in this particular company, run by doug parker who has been on tv a lot, cnbc, you just listen to the conference call. it's remarkable. he lays out everything. sometimes i can't believe how candid he is. doug parker is the man. the conference call is the thing. robin in california.

robin. >> caller: hey, jim. >> robin, how are you. >> caller: fine, thank you. i am a cramer gamer. >> thank you. >> caller: and i have a question about market limit orders. i used to buy them on open orders and often found that the stocks i bought were higher than when i placed the orders. so i took your advice which i heard you say multiple times to use limit orders. i was wondering, though, can i even improve on that brokerage firm? there's additional stuff like stop limit on clothes. >> those are all tricks. any time you don't determine what price you want you can be at the market's mercy. a lot of times people say jim you're being too careful. can you be too careful when it

comes to your money? bottom fishing, everyone loves it but how do we call that bottom? by reading the signals the market sends us when the market is at a slide and the estimates get slashed but the stock doesn't go down. do you know what that is? that's a true sign of a bottom. >> don't miss a second of mad money. follow @jim cramer on twitter. have a question, tweet cramer, #mad tweets. send jim an e-mail to mad money@cnbc.com or give us a call at 1-800-743-cnbc. miss something? head to madmoney.cnbc.com.

everybody makes a mistake sometime. that's classic investing advice. but if you want to become a great investor you don't just need to learn from your mistakes. anybody can tell you that. you need to learn how to recognize what your mistakes

actually are and by the same token, you need to notice what works. might sound trite. trust me, it's not. the thing about being human is we have a hard time acknowledging what's actually going on inside our own heads. we're full of all sorts of unconscious biases and that can make it difficult to learn from experience. but i'm not here to give you a psychology 101 lesson on cognition. it's important to remember you need to imapproach all the stuff impiericly. i used to keep a box of trading cards in my closet. i spend an amount of time scrutinizing these tickets looking for mistakes and patterns of wrong doing that needed correcting and much more rarely for patterns of success that needed repeating. these day i don't say have a box anymore but i have the record of my travel trust where we not only keep track of all of my trades but we also have my reasoning for buying or selling

a stock during that period. i recently analyzed the last five years of trades as part of my research for get rich carefully, my latest book and it taught me a lot of things. some might sound hard for you to swallow. the numbers, when tallied, don't lie. what do they teach us? i have another counter intuitive lesson for you. you need to stop worrying. when a company issued new stock it's bad news. we'll get killed by that. when a company does a secondary it tends to weigh on the stock for a time. it's also a terrible mistake. interest rates are low by historical standards. company can issue equity to pay back debt and risk their enterprises. that's why these deals are running to and not running from. the real estate investment trust have done a huge number of these secondaries. those deals have worked

fabulously. the money they raise refinances to carey a lower interest rates. the money falls straight to the bottom line allowing analysts to do it once the investment is complete. company issue stock to expand their businesses and that almost always produces a nice move up in the share price. third the newly raised capital might allow them to buy more properties which leads to greater earnings power and higher dividends down the road. you can find these deals in all sorts of companies that were hit hard by the housing crash and are now snapping back furiously. think about the mortgage insurance companies. that's a group that was left for dead, right? come on. the additional capital raised by their secondaries allow them to write more policies in new homes. you made a killing if you listened to me in february 2013. aren't stocks supposed to go down right after the offering?

i didn't want you to wait. i caught a lot of flak for that recommendation on twitter. they were plenty of sophisticated institutions out there chopping at the bit for a rating, though. they realized if the company got itself hand on more capital it could flourish. it's a secondary late dollars in late february. too much off a secondary. when you see these deals you need to take action, a bold action immediately. the opportunity will not last long if you wait. now, there's another kind of secondary i think you should jump all over. the kind that the master limited partnerships do. typically the players that finish their expansion plans to chris cross across the country to move oil and gas from texas, oklahoma, north dakota, texas, and pennsylvania to the rest of the nation. pipeline is the cheapest way to

transport oil and gas. constructing them is expensive and the companies need to raise money in the stock market. mark west. they're the best players out there and they have become issuers of equity and the deals almost all work. i have to warn you that these mass limited partnerships had high yielders and that means they can be dangerous stock where is bonds are becoming much more competitive. if we're in a moment where rates are stable you should jump all over these secondaries. they allow the companies to increase capacity so they can meet demand from the explosion oil and gas in this country. third, you should always keep an eye out for secondaries that are priced deep in the hole. meaning they're being sold at dramatically lower prices than where the stocks were trading when the deals were announced. september 2013 when social media darling linkedin was trading,

they wanted to sell billion dollars worth of stock to raise money. linkedin was willing to sell it's shares well below that price. you had to have a full service broker to know this. we said it on the show too. buyers lined up to get a piece of the deal. after they raised $1.2 billion, they sold 4 million shares at 223. it was a good deal for all involved. best of all, the stock immediately traded right back to where it had been. you only get these deep in the hole secondaries from full service brokers. you have to do business with them. the large corporate clients like to do these deals with their investment bankers and when you see these deals they're almost always worth trying to get. we reached a moment where they have become public since that time. i tried to shy away for fear that the private equity funds knew something we didn't.

these days that's too cynical. hi to revise a lot of things. some have high levels of debt left over and they have been able to refinances at much lower rate with the capital raised from the secondaries. refinancing at lower rates mean ace boost in earnings and lift to stocks. we have seen terrific performance. so here's the bottom line, forget the conventional wisdom that says a secondary stock offering always means the company is in trouble. there are many cases where secondaries make fabulous buying opportunities. when they refinances their high interest rate debt or when limited partnerships raise money to expand or newly equity backed names or where you get a deep in the hole deal where the price is too good to ignore. mitch in california. >> caller: how are you doing? >> good. >> caller: my question is regarding options trading.

i'm interested in adding options trading to my investment strategy. i want to know how important it is to implemented spreads and what are indicators to look for when choosing the option. >> in a book i wrote called getting back to even. i had 100 pages that tell you exactly what to do in those kind of strategiestrategies. in my book real money i talk about the very elemental options. and getting back to even i talk to you about the strategies i think you want to adopt in the option world. >> tony in california. >> caller: booyah or something like that. >> that's right. >> caller: this is tony and my question isn't about any one company, it's more like what mastercard did for its long timeshare holders with the splits and i was wondering why other companies don't do that more often. >> well, it's two words. it's two words, warren and buffet. he decided not to split his stock and people decided he knows more than we do.

he knows it's just eye candy. he's not going to split, we're not going to split. talked to them not long ago and they said we're not going to split and that stock is up big. sales force.com said we have to make our stock more accessible to retail. let's split it. beauty is in the eye of the beholder on this one and a lot of people don't want to go against warren buffet so they don't. can i go to john. >> caller: booyah cramer from sweet virginia. >> beautiful there. i wish i were there right now. what's up? >> caller: here's the question. i have been very fortunate thanks to you and i have done my research. i'm back to even. i retired at 62. i have a portfolio that i'm really pleased with and now my question is how do i -- in retirement, how do i protect it? because i don't feel like i need to amass it. i just need to protect it so i have been doing my homework and

i came up with two options and i wanted to get your read on them. >> sure. >> caller: one is these bond funds that are paying 7 3/4 and when you dig in them there's a few bonds but a lot of derivatives and other stuff. that's one option is these bond funds at 7 3/4 with a monthly pay out which will help my income flow and the second is these life insurance products that cap the down side and the upside so you really can never lose your portfolio but, you know, you can be limited to 1% one year. >> no, you never want to cap your upside. i think you should try to find yourself a bond fund that is very short-term right now. interest rates will go higher and then you'll be able to lock in good cds. that's because your cautious. i think you're way too young for that strategy, sir.

way too young but i have to exceed to the wishes of the people that call. we can learn from our mistakes. a secondary doesn't always mean that a company is in big trouble. there's many secondaries i want you in on and some that have been unbelievable to make a lot of money with. after the break i'll try to make you more money.

if there ever was a musician who understood the stock market it was kenny rogers. you have to know when the hold them and know when to fold them. know when to walk away and when to run. if you're reviewing the last five years of trades made by my charitable trust you can follow along. i have some suggestions for when you should fold them, if not walk away from your positions or even run. let me remind you i'm not blowing smoke here. opinions are like something unspeakable on national television. everyone has one. they all stick. i'm sharing the results of my research into what works and what doesn't. research icon du conducting whe writing get rich carefully. so in the spirit of the gambler i need to tell you when it comes to picking stocks cash is not

always king. if you buy a stock because it's sitting on a mountain of cash you can get crushed. people are buying the stocks at high levels because they had so much cash on their books. you probably heard pthem say ths has it in cash and therefore it's cheap. must be bought. as if cash, per se, is somehow a bullish thing. maybe in a high interest rate environment it might be good because then companies get extra income. but unless rates are high, cash by itself actually means very little. what really matters is how companies put that cash to work. sure it will give you nice sized dividends but those deals haven't met much in terms of a floor. these tech titans have also bought back a lot of stocks. these companies bought it back

badly. you can buy stock badly. often too high rather than opportunistic on weakness. they buy their own stock all over the place at any time. in short, sthey may have a lot f cash but that cash has been wasted on undisciplined by backs and when you see a company doing that, you should pass on its stock. time to walk away. it's one of the best performing stocks since the s&p 500's bottom in 2009. here's what you might not even know. it's called windham worldwide. holmes buys back stock aggressively and when it makes a difference. particularly during the downturns when most of the ceos are frozen and unable to step in and take advantage of the weakness that's market driven even though the declines are truly not obviously specific. plus it's far more than expected every year because holmes think

it's his duty to return his company's excess cash to the shareholders. i find that refreshing. he doesn't sit on it and do nothing except watch it grow at a low return that's slower than watching paint dry. no, he wants to fulfill his end of the social compact with shareholders. you stick with him and you don't rent wyndham worldwide stock. you own it. in return, holmes makes sure you get your cut of the business. and he grows that business as fast as he can. he's the very model of what they need at the helm. someone that understands it's important and recognize that it's part of his job to pig yfi out to best way to make that happen. let me tell you about what you should leave on the table. if you own shares in the company that starts blaming it's customers for its poor performance, it's time to walk

away. oh, boy, i learned this lesson the hard way. the maker of network and communication equipment in 2011. juniper was trading in the low 40s when it had the first short fall. they blamed nameless japanese customers for lack of orders. i don't know. i listen. frankly, i thought the explanation plausible. they were huge users of junipers products and the company and the country both got hit by the tsunami. the nuclear disaster dried up the orders. it's nice to think there would be a pause in the business after this. but soon the stock dropped to the 40s. more worries about missed orders. i stuck with juniper because the company had a ton of cash. it was clear europe had a lot of problems and i thought it was the fact that the u.s. government had been a juniper customer. it wasn't until the stock

dropped to the 20s that i realized juniper blame the customer act was a lame alibi. they were simply kicking their butt with amos trap. at that point it was happening. the customers were sitting on their hands. they weren't just sitting on their hands, they were buying elsewhere which i didn't realize until we dug deeper into the quarters and not junipers. the information was there to be had but only from a competitor. not from juniper itself. there's a simple moral here. when the company blames the customer, check to see whether the customer isn't actually still buying except from a different vendor. here's the bottom line, know when to hold them and know when to fold them. when a company is sitting on a mountain of cash and not doing anything with it, that's a stock you do not want to own. and when a company started blaming it's customers for short falls like juniper did in 2011, always be skeptical.

those customers may simply be giving their business to another player. may i speak to larry in massachusetts, please? larry? >> hey, jim, i can't wait to get my hands on the new book. it sounds like some of the best and most sophisticate td insight you have given us. >> you're kind. it is sophisticated. you want to do something carefully, you have to spend time doing it. what's up? >> i'll take war and peace if you write. to prepare us for the next warning season, you hate companies that don't warn about bad news and you chide those that always tell a down beat story. since the headline number is often misleading could you list some of the buzz words we should look for on a conference call to sniff out a wall of shamer versus a conservative overachie overachiever. >> avon had one of these not long ago. they said it was a bad quarter. you want to hear someone say a bad quarter is a bad quarter. if the quarter wasn't bad go right to the numbers and right before the q and a begins give

us the outlook. it should include the forecast for this quarter and next year. it should be reasonable. if you want to raise the forecast, don't go nuts but show us some conviction that business is going to be better next year or shut up. let's go to tomy in maryland. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. >> of course. >> caller: i'd like to know how can i identify bubble stock and if i'm in one how can i strategically plan my exit. >> okay. if i'm going to own a stock that you call bubble stock i would do it with deep in the money calls that cuts off my down side. it's a stock not defined by the four walls of earnings per share. it's measured on revenues or some other way to measure things. i like earnings per share. i except the fact that when i'm not in an earnings per share environment i am in a bubble because all you're doing at that point is playing the greater fool. that's okay. it can be played. can i go to ian in new york?

>> caller: happy holidays to you and your family. >> same. >> caller: and i big thank you for all that you do. >> you're terrific. thank you. >> caller: i own goldman sachs and held on for 60% round trip because i believe in their stories. jim, my question to you is what specific percent calls you to actually pull the trigger. >> when i was a trader i used to think down 5% i have to go. i don't want to turn a trade into an investment by having it go against me. these days if i do the homework and the stock goes down i'm drawn to that decline, not against it. i'm not endorsing bubbles. i'm saying if you're going to do the bubble thing do it with deep in the money calls. it's not my thing. my travel trust doesn't have any stocks i regard as bubbles. you have to know when to hold them and when to fold them.

watch out when companies hit on cash that don't do any returns for you and be ware of companies that blame the customer. stay with cramer.

a huge part of this business can simply be boiled down to a simple thing, figuring out where a given stock is headed. that isn't always easy. sometimes it's a lot less obvious than the other times. as i'm constantly telling you, most stocks trade on their earnings per share numbers. when the earnings are going higher the stock rallies. figuring out the trajectory may take serious homework. most stocks. most of the time. for some earnings are not the most important metric. if the only thing you're watching is the earnings per share, you could end up missing fabulous opportunities. that's why you need to keep track of the key metrics for everything you own. when it comes to oil companies, production growth and not earnings is the key. for many tech stocks it's the average selling price of their products, not the earnings.

in these sectors, these are more important than anything related to beating the earnings estimates that are out there. my travel trust during a period where it beat the earnings estimates but the production growth disappointed quarter after quarter. even though it beat wall street estimates the stock went down because of the production short falls. if devon would have reported lower earnings and higher production growth the stock would have rallied. i know that because my charitable trust owned chevron at the same time and while they didn't hit the earning numbers it advanced anyway as opposed to superior production growth. it's no wonder that devon has been one of the worst performing equities. it's been undermanaged for a long time now. here's another example. i totally missed the bottom at m and letter u. i wasn't paying enough attention to the real key metric here. it had been a dog for more than

a decade. when the company reported one more terrible earnings number i thought who cares. then the stock jumped. i was like what did i miss? dynamic random access memory chips. the most basic in the food chain and they had a nice bump up in the average selling prices during the quarter. not down but bumped up. that was extraordinary and something no one expected. it happened because the business was so horrible for so long. in many companies the industry had thrown up their hands and given up. a rarity in this commodity business. they went on to buy a failing japanese competitor taking out still more capacity and it has been off to the races every since from december 2012 to december 2013. there's one more metric that might not seem to be important but is all that matters. when a company is based in the united states but all we care about is how it's doing in emerging markets, particularly china, one of my best buys ever

was picking up young brands, the parent of kfc, taco bell and pizza hut was a decline in sales. if you didn't know better, you were flabbergasted it could have gone down. but the growth of this company isn't in the united states. it's in china. even though the rest of the company did well and wall street estimates were still beaten, it got caught anyway. soon after the company demonstrated that they turned it around. don't let it be known that it's earnings would be slashed as it boosted chinese advertising. in other words, eps coming down. no matter, even though the earnings were about to get hurt, you had to buy the stock on that earnings short fall. not long after that, the chinese business began to turn around because of the promotion and the stock headed back to its 52 week high because the sales growth in china is more important to the stock than the actual reported earnings of the entire chain. as much as we like to keep

things simple, sometimes the truly important metric can elude us. with most stocks the earnings per share number is the key metric. since the market bottomed in 2009, there's criticism about how the averages rallied on bottom line numbers, only without any real revenue growth. i'm telling you that analysis was and is absurd. these so-called experts think they're being careful when they tell you to wait for revenues but they're actually being reckless and kept you out of some of the best stocks out there. here's the bottom line. the earnings are not always all important. in some sectors like tech and oils, not to mention u.s. companies that depend on overseas growth, there's key metrics that matter more than earnings but for the bulk of the market, nothing is more important than beating the earnings per share estimates. stick with cramer. >> from our family to yours, happy holidays cramerica.

peace and procesperity from allf us here at mad money.

if there's one lesson i have learned from viewing all of my trades from my chapel trust, all the ones of the last five years. actually there's 14 of them in get rich carefully. the one i want to leave you with is this, if you have a high quality stock with terrific prospects that you want to own for the long haul, don't sell it at the first gain or the first sign of turbulence. if you have a conviction in a

stock, you do need to let it ride. let me put this in sports terms because people will understand this. when a football player needs to keep a player no matter what, they name him a franchise player. i can't tell you how many times i wished i had that definition of franchise player for charitable trust. instead we say we want to own it thick or thin. say we want it. that's the word. operative say. but so often we don't follow through with that and it's almost always a big mistake. the temptation is always so p palpable it can take you to fight against it. you never want a gain to turn into a loss. but when i pinned that rule ten years ago i was talking about trading wins. if you own a stock and you think you can go out for the next few years and not the next few days, then by all means, do your best to make it a franchise player. stick the nontrade label on it. you won't regret it.

all bets are off if the business starts to deteriorate. if that's the case you must immediately sell or you'll be to blame. but that's the really case where you should rid yourself of a core holding or i'll suspect you'll leave an enormous amount of money on the table. all of that great research you did out the window, once the stock is dubbed a franchise player, stop giving it away, please. hold out for better prices. well, guess what, buy more. my record is crystal clear on this. when we own a stock that i think is materially undervalued in the underlying enterprise i have to do everything i cannot to take the gain and eliminate that. that disparity, you have to let it percolate. it's vital that you keep enough left in your portfolio so that it will still be meaningful if the stock continues to advance. what makes me sure of this rule? we raise stocks from 1 to 4 for the charitable trust and they're meant to be core positions. franchise players and they're supposed to be hallowed ground.

we want to get as many shares as we want. but as i look at the last five years it's unnerving so see how many of these, the category of ones we solds because of sort term market turbulence. the stocks continue to roar ahead after i sold them. core position is what it says. something that's integral to your portfolio. it should not be so easily dislodged. if we had been able to hold on to more core positions for the trust we would have been able to donate a lot more to charity than the 1.8 million we have given away. core holdings are called that for a reason. resist the urge to sell your franchise players no matter how tempting it might be. the only time it makes sense to blowout of a core holding is if the fundamentals take a nose dive. but aside from that, you need to try to let these winners ride. only trimming your position some what to keep it from getting too oversized versus the rest of your portfolio. mad money is back after the break.

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we got to get to some of the

tweets you have been sending at me jim cramer #mad tweets. how certain is your exit strategy before you buy a stock? if it is a trade, i have a catalyst. when the catalyst comes, no matter what, i sell the stock. if it's an investment, my exit strategy is usually multiyear. particularly if i sign it as a franchise player meaning a number one. you can read all about how i grade things and price targets and everything in our weekly bulletin. two -- now let's go to a tweet from andy who asked best piece of advice you have ever gotten. my best piece of advice is from a friend zach shepherd that told me they don't all go up at once. i would get upset when i had stocks that went down on an up day and it would drive me crazy until he told me i was driving him crazy. keep that in mind. maybe the others are good.

up next a tweet, jim, are you a fan of selling puts in order to sell a stop position you like? thanks. no, i think it's idiotic. you have unlimited down side and limited upside. what kind of possible strategy is that? remember, this is really important. when i was in the '87 crash, the people that did that strategy got wiped out and it's in my mind. our next tweet, jim, when you have a price target, what is the time of fruition? 6 months? a year? no. i just want to own it and if the story keeps checking out i'll stay in it. if the story doesn't check out, if it starts getting worse, i'll go. our next question, my 4-year-old son gets excited when i turn to #mad money with @jim cramer. hopefully the information will stick with him for life. if you get people in early they can make mistakes and they have

the rest of their life to make up for the mistakes. that's why i'm so passionate about early. let's take a tweet from barney who asks is a buy order treated differently from a buy short order in the order system? matters what your broker does. if your broker hasn't a different type then you have to designate. i don't know what your broker has. let's go to a tweet from katie who asked the following, booyah, thank you for everything you do for us home gamers. love the show. you're very sweet. i do pour my heart and soul into this one. i have to tell you. up next, a tweet who asks how is the little guy supposed to get in on ipo. called four different brokers and needed 50,000 minimums to get a shock at the shares. it's up to the brokers. it seems unfair and it's the way it's been and i don't think you can buc the trend. this is for good clients and the ones they give you if you're not a good client tend not to be that good. it's a fact of life.

life is unfair. stick with cramer. >> keep up with cramer all day long. follow @jim cramer on twitter and tweet your questions #mad tweets.

>> from our family to yours. happy holidays cramerica. peace and prosperity from us here at mad money. >> i always say there's always a bull market somewhere and i promise to find it here for you on mad money. i'm jim cramer and i'll see you next time. calls you've never heard" show. you have a feeling in your gut, my dear becky, that she used that $8,000 to go play, go to the movies, buy clothes, and do all that stuff, don't you? >> i'm trying to have a good relationship with my daughter, so i'm not really going there. >> also... >> i bought whole-life insurance when i was 22 years old. >> i so want everybody who's watching, i want everybody to learn from -- i'm so sorry to say -- your serious mistake that you made here. and you ask me, "can i afford it?" >> i want to buy a playground swing set for my boys. >> $1,800 so they can swing all over the place.