whiskey. >> right on. >> in a pool. >> a whirlpool. >> in a whirlpool of whiskey. happy new year to everyone, have a safe, safe holiday. we'll see you on thursday at 5:00 for more "fast." "mad meantime "mad money" with jim cramer starts right now. my mission is simple. to 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. other people want to make friends. i'm just trying to make you a little money. my job is not just to entertain you, but to teach so call me at 800-743-cnbc. tonight i'm going to tell you who i am and how i got here.

no. not i am jim cramer, host of "mad money," "squawk on the street". that plus an avatar and 140 characters sums up everyone these days. i want to you know more than that. although it did take me two years to learn an avatar wasn't a movie and a hash tag wasn't a number sign. what i want to do tonight in an extremely special and personal show even by my own whacky standards is trace the arc that brought me to "mad money," not for an ego trip but to give you some money making lesson from the phases of my various careers and how you can profit from them. remember in the end this is cramerica. in short i'm going to give you the best of cramer guide book. so i can help you become better than i have ever been or ever will be and that's the ultimate goal of "mad money". let's start real early back in

the time machine. my love of stocks didn't begin after law school or college or high school. my love for stacks started back in fourth grade. see my dad would bring home the philadelphia bulletin. at that point one of the largest newspapers in the country. great afternoon paper. that's when he returned from work every night. i wanted it from comics and sports. i was a phillies fan back then. 89 miles south of new york. no one would choose to affiliate themselves with a team with the most amount of losses in all of history. curiosity has been a blessing and a curse of mine. anyway, there was always this solid chunk of the paper impenetrable to me, called the business section. it had these giant list of names and agate type that went on forever. the other tables. different from the batting

average tables and box scores i would scrutinize. when you read them from left to right it made no sense. open. range. close. what open? what range? what close? what were these strange things? why did they matter? i asked my dad. i would hear him get mad when he would hear prices mentioned on the radio. in particular he always seemed angry when i heard something called national video. and how national video went out. i didn't know what national video did and why it went out. it made him furious. i wanted to find out more. so he sat me down and explained each of these lines represented the line of the stock. the range was how low and how high it traded and the close was how much it was worth when trading finished at the "closing bell". it fascinated me.

how could there be so many companies and why the heck did they trade in ranges and what did it mean to close? he described to me that people tried very hard to figure out each day which stocks would go up at the close and buy them so they could make money from the increase during that range from the open to close. frankly this struck me as down right silly. i told him when i looked at the baseball tables i was trying to figure out who was hot, who would go up in average and who would go down and what it meant for the teams i liked. he said it was the same for stocks. some players were doing okay. some were as hot as a pistol. some were dudes. i wanted to know if i could learn something from just following the ranges, reading the tables. he said why don't you try. it seemed in my house the radio was always on until pop put on the tv on.

we watched the news while we ate dinner. most of the news was about the war. meaning the war in vietnam. it was frightful and scary. fortunately the war was winding down at the time i got to my draft number and it was a high one. right after the world news on the radio or tv they mentioned the dow jones industrials average and they either talked or showed the most active stocks. then the ones that had done the best or the worst. national video was often on the worst list i discovered. hence the anger. so what i did was write the names down that i heard and i tracked them. kept them in, believe it or not, this ledger that i still have. here it is. what a terrific game. i was trying to figure out the next move of the stock. even as all i knew was the name, polaroid, xerox, national video, pan am, united. most were defense stocks and

they went up a lot. in tandem with the war. hey, so i followed a lot of those. a bunch of others. look at that. conair. eastern. national rca. admiral. i decided this was as cool a game as imaginable. i wanted to introduce this to my fifth grade class. i showed them my ledger. inviting everybody to play. i have to admit not everyone was into it as i was. my dad's company at the time was called national box company represented the 3m corporation. then the minnesota mining and manufacturing company in the philadelphia area, selling tape and a fancy ribbon that bowed easily. we were talking satin ribbon. had to make the bows. triple m was innovating, coming up with new product lines. it still does. which is why favor it. pop came home with a new line of

3m he was selling, games. they got into 3m book shelf games. he said perhaps i might want to learn more about how the stock market really worked and the company had created two games about business. acquire about takeovers and stocks and bonds of which i am fortunate enough to have gotten a copyright here. courtesy of george who is producing "mad money" who gave to it me for the holidays. i almost cried when george gave to it me. i loved that game so much. i asked the ceo of 3m to bring the games back. the point of mentioning all of this from my own makeshift game to stocks and bonds which george bought off of e-bay stocks are fascinating enough to get your kids started in them right now. it's easier than ever. pick some stocks. maybe not of defense companies although they are performing in an odd and positive way.

but companies that are familiar to your kids and have them track them and guess which will do better over time. not the growth corporation of america, not the pioneer mutual fund. stocks that are real. here's the bottom line of my childhood stock market obsession. get started early. and they may play for life. because the stock market is a long term contest and one i think the earlier you get in the more you can win. i'm going to mickey in new york. mickey. >> caller: hey jim i want to thank you for all you do. i've been investing since i've been quite young. what kind of changes to my investment process should i make as i get older. >> when you're in your 50s 50% bonds, no more. interest rates are way too low.

find some conservative stocks that give you good yield and shift over time and you can pick up some income. rick in arizona. rick? >> caller: hello, mr. cramer. how are you? >> real good. how about you? >> caller: i'm doing great, sir. my question four i have a couple of young children, trying to get them started in investing. the question i have is what advice and what are the most essential items or ideas on investing concepts do people need to know when they start learning the market. >> first thing they need to know is what they own and the idea behind that is to own things like disney. dominos pizza. mcdonald's. go to the mall. go to costco. go to places you're familiar with. read the annual. buy a share. one share. get him or her involved. get them started early. teach your kids about the market. it is a very valuable lesson.

and there are many more coming up on this special edition of "mad money". we'll be right back. >> announcer: don't miss a second of "mad money". follow @jimcramer on twitter. have a question, tweet cram cramer #madtweets. or give us a call at 1-800-743-cnbc. miss something? head to mad money.cnbc.coadmone.

. welcome back to a bizarrely special "mad money" where i'm trying to teach you life lessons in investing from my life. while 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 in life to learn a thing or two and tonight you're getting that wisdom from the school of hard knocks. don't you love it at the beginning of a pro football game the player says his name and the name of the school and school of hard knocks. you're getting the on tv version right here right now. we covered how i first got involved, my fourth grade obsession of keeping a ledger to track stocks and then ultimately to learn how they trade through the greatest game on earth. no, it wasn't monopoly. it was stocks and bonds. but with its little certificates and its game boards, and its cards, it tells you about news and how that sends a stock higher or lower. that's what this was all about. i left the stock market games behind me by time i got to middle school. which was then called junior high. my obsession was sports. i ran track of course.

the other thing i cared about was girls whose moments were more elusive than any of this stuff. they were more elusive than the ranges of stocks. that was a random walk down springfield high main street. i couldn't win for losing. that's the subject for a different show. however my father did ingrain in me the desire to save. early on i learned even in high school you got to save. i saved as i bussed tables at the old block and cleaver. i told first cold soda, ice cold and then ultimately graduated into selling ice cream. very quickly at that job i learned the value of market power. specifically cornering the market and i paid people to give them the exclusive right to sell ice cream. on the 600 and 700 level of the

mets stadium. can you imagine how much money can be made if you had the only franchise in the whole upper deck even for a team as horrible as the phillies. by paying those guys not to sell ice cream against me i made fortunes. maybe the other time when steve carl would pitch. got players out so fast i would get stuck with unsold ice cream had to buy the ice cream from the company before selling it. i would take a genuine beating, talk about learning how business worked. the shelf life of ice cream on a hot july night is short. i moiight jest with your name. i loved bizarre false intimacy. made a ton of money. i opened an account at fidelity

with the magellan fund. it was the top performing fund. peter lynch wrote two investment books one on wall street and "beating the street." i didn't save enough when i got to college. the money paid was work study and went toward my tuition and room and board. when i got out of college an after a lot of attempts to get a job in the nuclear weapon business rejected by more than 50 papers i have every single rejection letter in the trunk. i ran a position as a general assignment reporter. it was hard when i got started. how poor i was. nevertheless, poor, $156. i contributed even then. i put a few dollars away when i could. not long after i applied to and

got a job at the los angeles herald examiner. making $179 a week. it was about four times as expensive of living in tallahassee. i found an apartment in the fairfax district. pretty sketchy. nicer now. around the corner from pioneer chicken which was way too expensive for me to go to. few weeks later i was stalked and broken into repeatedly. something the cops were helpless to stop. at the time i was assigned at san diego a horrible school shooting. when i returned everything was gone. everything i had. so it began. mitre bill but thrilling six months of living in my car basically trying to get by, the only upside being when you might have met a women, pretty easy to figure out the night inquiry, your place or mine. as much as i knew my ultimate

goal was to save enough to get an apartment, people would take me in now and then so i could get a shower, change, gate good night's sleep. i still never quit saving. i remember cashing my paycheck every other week and writing a check to fidelity magellan fund. you only had gas, food and insurance if you were living in your car. how poor was i yet still putting money away? when i got sick and jaundiced liver, i had no health care. the hmo that my paper belonged to had no branch. so i had to go to migrant farm workers clinic. i was making weekly trips to the doctor. up shot, given money to the best stock picker of all time i

manage through all the years, 35 years later to put enough money away to take advantage of the great bull markets of our time. not to brag but to teach. that money ultimately amounted to a fund well into the six figures. not because of my capital additions. i stopped putting money away in that fund years ago but because of the power of compounding with amazing investor at the helm. i think the takeaway here is i want to you save no matter what. obviously the earlier the better. when cnbc has those all-star managers on. send the money in as little or as much as can you. if i could still send those checks to fidelity magellan fund when i was living in my car, sick as a dog and saved by a pistol by my side the most down and out you can be, you can put some money too.

after the break i'll try to make you some more money. >> announcer: in the never ending battle for real-time data news and the american way, it is time for super mobile cnbc. real-time quotes. breaking news, of course. but there's more. now, access live, cnbc tv with your bare hands. on your iran pad, iphone. it's an app, it's video, it's cnbc tv live and on demand. online. the ocean gets warmer. the peruvian anchovy harvest suffers. it raises the price of fishmeal, cattle feed and beef. bny mellon turns insights like these into powerful investment strategies. for a university endowment. it funds a marine biologist... who studies the peruvian anchovy.

invested in the world. bny mellon. the energy in one gallon of gas is also enough to keep your smartphone running for how long? 30 days? 300 days? 3,000 days? the answer is... 3,000 days. because of gasoline's high energy density, your car doesn't have to carry as much fuel compared to other energy sources. take the energy quiz. energy lives here. [ male announcer ] this december, experience the gift of exacting precision

and some of the best offers of the year at the lexus december to remember sales event. this is the pursuit of perfection. i needed a new laptop for my pre-med classes, something that runs office and has a keyboard. but i wanted a tablet for me, for stuff like twitter and xbox, so my downtime can be more like uptime. that's why i got a windows 2 in 1 which does both -- works as a laptop and a tablet. so i can manage my crazy life, and also have a life. [ beep ] gotta go. ♪ we're riding the delicious magical money mystery tour tonight and i'm giving you the life lessons i learned the hard way. i told you first how to get your

kids started early. in this told you about how nothing should ever stop you from investing. listen, if i can do it living in a 1977 ford fairmont you can put money away too. right now i want to tell you how i got started in individual stock picking. even after seemingly interminable periods of chaos. yes, it's the reason i believe you watch, certainly your inclination. that's much like the funny outfits. the outrageous sound board courtesy of when i used to have a radio show. the "mad money" called real money. if you're picking stocks, playing with real money not just with a ledger, or with a game of stocks and bonds. you need to open an account. i got started in 1979 there was no such things as an online

account. i had an account with fidelity. when i first started i didn't know where to look for ideas so i turned to forbes. people at forbes don't take this personally but i read a nifty article about an orange grower in florida. it was very compelling. i bought first thing ten shares for nine bucks. a week later a frost hit and wiped out the whole crop. my investment was more than cut in half. i was completely devastated. but not defeated. i sold it and took the capital and went back to forbes and bought seven shares of bobbie brooks. and my money was halved again. fortunately i had a decent job at a magazine. i was making 20 gs and living in

less thanning a swank studio. the cheap $40 a month rent with the sofa bed, twice the rent for a beautiful apartment in tallahassee. after a particularly hard night on the town i fell in love with the breakfast at bob evans farm. finding out it was publicly traded when i went back home i visited the huge fabulous mid-town manhattan new york conglomerate. i devoured everything i could about bob evans farm. they had magazines with articles, microfiche, a four month old financials and write ups that allowed me to compare it with other companies in the industry. i knew i had a good one. i bought 20 shares. the stock went up immediately. and a stock split. i figured out the first component of investing, know what you own. what did i know about oranges or

women's fashion. but eggs and sausages? a company i found, long tradition of good service. notice that was for me. next up, standard press steel. well no that became sps technologies. from my old home town. they made screws for airplanes. why sps? because a buddy of mine from high school told me they were hiring like mad. wondered if i was looking for a job, paying good money. i had a job. back to the library for more research. solid company. no doubt. nothing in print about its hiring push. ripe for a trade, right? no one had that skinny. you know it doubled long after and by that i caught the bug for good. 23 years later acquired by precision cast parts.

so now i figured it out best investment ideas come from what you know meld with information from public sources even if they are as late and hard to source as taking a trip to the new york public library when i was supposed to be working. i didn't like the random way i was making money through this. a friend from home lucky call about a job. a hearty breakfast at bob evans restaurant. there's got to be a more methodical way, right? look around at work. at the time i was covering mergers and acquisition, profiling some, following the deals. it seemed like every other deal was in the oil patch one after another after another small to mid-size oil companies were being acquired. all i was doing was standing around and writing about it. so i went back to the library, took out some editions of value line a stock research magazine and checked out the pages.

i cross referenced them to other research to find out which one could be acquired without problems. i settled on an oil company in indonesia. i didn't have to wait long before they were bought. another lesson learned. if you want to play takeovers. buy companies that would do well on their own bund under managed which is the consensus i found about reading articles about the oil enterprise. another oil company with big engineer scale could do more. as much as i had hit some winners i was distraught that i had given up the ghosts in those first few trades. at the point i was hanging around the track. yeah, the track on weekends. mostly aqueduct near by. i learned to handicap by reading

the books of the "the washington post" sports writer. they made me the second best investment books. they teach discipline, how to identify the best thoroughbreds, the best long shots, going to out of the way tracks where information is less well-known. find the ones where the pay off was more sure and bet big. cut your loss physician you're having a bad run. every one of these lessons can be applied to the stock market. you can take a huge swing when you know what you're doing particularly when others don't on a less well-known stock. don't gamble on stocks for the excitement or fun of it. most important be disciplined, don't let your losses pile up. after five years of professional journalism i decided to hang it up and go to law school. i saved enough to pay for my first year all in the stock market because i would never be able to make enough if i kept it in a savings account. so here's the bottom line. you want to 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. and the conference calls i tell you are a must if you're going to know what you're doing. simple? no. lucrative? you bet it is! frank in arizona. >> caller: jim, whenever i'm considering buying or selling a stock i look at the bid price and the ask price, sometimes that price vaeng narrow, sometimes it's wide. how is that information useful in determining if it's time to pull the trigger? >> look if you like the stock i'll tell you it's irrelevant. what really matters because if you want to hold the stock for a while you just have to hold it and forget about that bid/ask spread. i used to spread buy stocks that had, we used to say drive a truck through them. things are easier. don't worry about the spread. [ male announcer ] here's a question for you:

where does the united states get most of its energy? is it africa? the middle east? canada? or the u.s.?

the answer is... the u.s. ♪ most of america's energy comes from right here at home. take the energy quiz. energy lives here.

tonight's show is all about

you learning from my attendance at the university of financial hard knocks with a major in investing. i've taken you through the importance of getting started early and saving no matter what. i've shown you how to to spot winners. through examples of my life. now i'm going to gave sense of how you can become a trader if you want to. and be a good one at that. hey, you know what? "mad money" has changed and changed time and time again over the years. it's been on for so long. i have deliberately ask youed it in the last 500 some-odd shows away from trading and much more oriented towards investing. there's so many more obstacles to trading these days. you have to watch your position like a hawk. you can't do your job at the same time and follow the market. there's so many people with great set of tools and ability ofaccessing products.

you're going one on one with the big boys if you attempt trading at home or at work. it's almost a sucker's game. there's some advantages that you have now that you sure didn't have when i started trading in my law school dorm back in '81. first commissions are so, so much lower so you can get in and get out without so much friction and after commission profit. that's why i'm not worried about the spread as i said earlier. second the information you need is on your personal computer, even your smartphone. i would have to call brokers all day. third trading is lightning fast. back then i didn't know what price i got my stock. when i was in class i had to use pay phones. you had to wait in line while some kid chatted endlessly to his girlfriend or some woman was calling her mom. at the same time i had to go with what i knew. i knew individual stocks for all the stories about harvard law

including the movie paper chase. i can tell you there was a ton of down time and a good business school library across the river. as well as up to date microfiche quarterly reports those little plastic thing, all things considered i possessed the best available public information around at that time. the first thing i decided to do given the circumstances twombgs on findi -- to find one good trading deal a week. if you want to start trading, i discarded a ton of ideas of stocks that had catalysts, possible mergers. an article on the front page of the "new york times" might be talking about some break through in medicine, a brokerage report might discuss potential for oil find opinion i started my first writing about the market.

yeah. i wrote a newsletter called mr. bullish which i mailed to my parents once a week. clearly articulated the thesis behind my trade. i typed it on my olympic typewriter. i would do no trade if i could explain exactly what the company did andy like it and what would happen. i had that level of discipline. no buying of anything that didn't have an exit strategy. i had to have an exit strategy from the moment i put the trade on. an important lesson, made discipline by the insistence of a written thesis before i pulled the trigger. when you trade you must trade with confidence. none of this scared stuff. you can easily be shaken out by the broader market if you aren't. you want to trade with confidence. ask yourself, would you be willing to put a stock recommendation on your voice mail and update it every week. hi this is jim cramer. i'm not here right now but i

like monolithic. i had my conviction of pick of the week. i was putting my money where my mouth was. i got some freelance work for "new york times" and moon light work for a professor. it wasn't before long that marty, a publish for new republic magazine tried to get me to write a piece. i neglected to call him back. he got three weeks of trades off of that answering machine. he said he made more money from my answering machine than years from professional money managers and wanted to give me half a million to manage. he said he had confidence in me. shortly thereafter, he did give me a check for half a million dollars. that was real money back then. i had it in my hands. like too hot for the touch.

i ran down to fidelity with the money. i went right to work trading. almost immediately i lost a ton of it. and i could see how i would have to wash dishes at marty's house and mow the lawn for 127 years for blowing the 500 gs i had blown. my mistake that's clint eastwood told us, a man has to know his own limitations. you can't put the money to work all at once, you can do so only after ideas you knew had a chance to pan out. knowing that you would be gone whether it worked or not to keep that discipline intact. ivy lated my own rules and i had blown it. i confessed to marty my sins and

said you should take whatever is left of the money back. instead he wanted to give me more money. he was betting i learned my lesson. you know what? he was right. i then reverted to my old style trying to be right about one idea at a time, keeping the rest in cash, going big when i had the most conviction. any trader would do. i slowly but surely made it back. i also paper invested more active but not truly investing. that would become the beginning of my actual professional investing career. here's the bottom line. if you're going to trade make sure you have a catalyst, an exit point and you're out of the stock either way -- either way because you're trading not investing. you need conviction and you have to ask yourself would you be willing for the world to hear hi it's me i'm not here right now but i want you to take a swing

at disney. if you can do all those things start small. give it a try. stick with cramer. amazon starte. hewlett packard, and disney both started in garages. mattel started in a garage. ♪ the ramones started in a garage. my point? you never know what kind of greatness can come out of an american garage. introducing the 2014 motor trend car of the year. the all new cadillac cts. ain't garages great?

welcome back to this special autobiographical edition of "mad money". now we're up to the professional grade. my time when i started at goldman sachs. now i had been courting and been courted by goldman sachs for three years before i got a job. it was then called security sales helping individuals and small institutions manage their money. i got a ton of history of those years as well as some of what i talked about earlier. you can get the skinny at my goldman days. but that's not what tonight's show is about. tonight's show is about learning how to trade and investing by studying with me at the university of hard knocks. now i will dispense with the anecdo anecdotes. it's fine to have fun. i'm about making money. first, that's where i began to understand the process of actual

money management. not picking a stock here or there. but the process. the ability to build a portfolio from the ground up. and i had the best teachers in the world at goldman sachs. one of the great hedge fund managers at the time, lee cooper. he put on investing clinic almost every day of which i never missed a session. hardly an hour went by when i didn't hear a great new idea to explore. you know who i learned from? my customers. it was at goldman i learned something that still isn't under stood by many and that's individuals can and do beat the market quite regularly. why don't they know it? if they only worked goldman with me they would see it, they would know what i saw. no they were all unpractical. when i was at goldman i had

nondiscretionary accounts, i wasn't allowed to invest anybody else's money with my own ideas unless i could win them over. remember i was on commission. and made money with buys and sells. there was no 1% fee or 20% for the wins. that came later. that's write learned how important it was to talk over a story with an individual, be able to articulate it in a way that made sense. can do you that to someone if you were picking a stock? you had to know your stuff. i often asked the buyers questions if they knew enough about the stocks, their stores about the ones they suggested to me they wanted to buy. i wanted them to be as educated as possible about my idea or their ideas. that's because i knew that stocks go down and i knew if it went down -- let's say if it went up it would be their idea. right. if it went down it's on me. and that is just human nature.

i realized that very quickly. what else did i learn? how about humility. it was at goldman sachs that i first figured out how humbling this business could be. the great bull market just started not long before i hired. when one of your ideas went against you you had to get on the horn and explain either why the person should buy or whether they should cut their losses. that's why you always have to recognize how infallible investing can be. and what to do when stocks go against you. i learned let your gains run. many of my clients were terrific business people that didn't know that much about stocks. they were fabulous at their own enterprises building up their wealth through actual companies. i had this one client, real estate tycoon. he hadding worked hard to get where he was. i was working hard to try to get

him as a client, trying to win him over and it took me ages and ages. i told him when i finally convinced him that he should work with me i would work hard and get it right by him. he said point blank he didn't want to trade. no trading, jim. i want longer term investments. at the time i liked kimberly-clark the paper company. i still do. i told this client that i thought this one, kmb would be terrific for his portfolio. he agreed. i got it. i got the sale. he told me to buy 1,000 shares. i got it! almost immediately it went up eight points. it was a dream. i had a winner. so i called him, i said, bob, bob, i want to ring the register. i want to sell the 1,000 shares of kimberly-clark. i thought he would thank me. he was furious. he told me that i had said

kimberley would be good for the long term, would have great gains over time, he wasn't interested in making $8,000. he questioned my integrity. he wanted to know if i was churning him. that's a horrible charge. meaning i was just trying to generate commissions with his money. you know what? i was scorched and torched. but he did teach me a terrific lesson. just as you don't want to turn a trade into an investment because that's a sign you're racing a loss, you don't want to turn investment into a trade. you have a good one let it run for heaven's sake. bob was right. kimberley ultimately doubled. and i was vindicated despite myself. finally i learned the science behind building a portfolio and how to create long term wealth. a lot of my business came through people who came into a large amount of cash. now these people tended to be rather unsophisticated about

their money even as they may have been sophisticated about something else in life. i regarded my first job as listening to their needs, figuring out what they wanted, were they conservative, did they want capital preservation. they didn't want to risk their money. were they aggressive? did they want capital appreciation. build that wealth quickly. i tried to get to know them and i urged them to get to know themselves just as you should know yourself. you may think you want to get rich quick, believe me you want to get rich carefully. can you handle the pain of a market decline. do you want to participate in new issues. try that. could be too risky. do you want to try to hit it out of the park with some capital, maybe a larger part. many of you are familiar with these lessons. i try to teach you how to kmour self and to know what you can handle and can't.

finally this is when i learned the value of diversification. oil companies can couple and couple again a short time after they struck oil. we figured out how big the finds were. everybody got caught up in the oils. i want oil in my personal account. every day seemed like another great day. oil services. oil platforms. you name it. then one day oil, the commodity, plummeted in price. the saudis started pumping like mad. those who had nothing but oils we were crushed. i had understood firsthand from right then the concept of diversification. i never again intentionally avoided diversification. hence why i think it's so

important because i almost lost everything and i worked hard to get it. i learned from my early days at sarbanes-oxley core principles -- at goldman sachs core principles of investing. remember all my investors who beat the market on their own in ways they liked, aided by people like me who would work with them to put their plans into action. it's as simple as this.

at bny mellon, our business is investments. managing them, moving them, making them work. we oversee 20% of the world's financial assets. and that gives us scale and insight no one else has. investment management combined with investment servicing. bringing the power of investments to people's lives. invested in the world. bny mellon.

you follow my love affair with stocks. i showed the importance of getting started early in investing. you learned how to find the good ideas, how to research them. i want to wish you success in trading and investing and to remind you when you hear from the nay sayers you can't make money at home the story of my life at every turn is the opposite. you can make money in many

different ways. stick with cramer.

always a bull market somewhere, and i promise to find it just for you right here on "mad money." i'm jim cramer, and i'll see you next time! . welcome to the new year's eve live edition of the kudlow report and what a year it's been for stocks. you can call it the buy and hold boring rally or rodney dangerfield get no respect rally. call it what you like. this was the best year for the dow since 1995, 18 years ago. washington didn't have a thing to do with it. our resilient economy, a free market economy was the big driver. tonight we ask what will the new year bring? now with obamacare kicking in for real in just a few hours washington is going to be interfering more and more in health care and our personal lives in 2014. are america's hospitals, doctors and patients ready for a year