>> i like eem. >> i like eem technically and like it also relative to the s&p. >> our time has expired. thanks so much for watching. see you back here next friday at 5:30. in the meantime, don't go anywhere. "mad money" starts right now. have a great weekend. 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. hey, i'm cramer. other people want to make friends, i'm trying to make you a little money. my job is not just to entertain you, but to teach. call me at 1-800-743-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," squa"squawk on the stree street". that plus "avatar" in 140 characters pretty much sums up everyone these days. and i want you to know more than that, although it did take me two years to learn that avatar wasn't a movie and a hashtag wasn't a number sign. what i want to do tonight in an extremely special and personal show, even by my own wacky standards is trace the arc that brought me to "mad money." not for some autobiographical ego trip, but to give you money-making lessons from the faces of my various careers and how you can profit from them. remember, in the end, this is cramerica. in short, i'll give you the skinny of how i learned to be a good investor and how i continue to learn every day, so i can help you continue to learn better than i am or ever will be. let's start real early back in the time machine. my love of stocks didn't begin

after law school or college or even high school. my love for stocks started back in fourth grade. that's right, fourth grade. my dad would bring home the old philadelphia bulletin, at that point, one of the largest newspapers in the country. a great afternoon paper. that's when he would return from work every day. if i could go back in time, i would have somehow made it so i was a yankee fan, though. we were only 89 miles south of new york! because no one ever chose to affiliate himself with a team that has the most amount of losses in all of professional sports history. i was a curious kid, though. curiosity has always been a blessing and a curse of mine. not unlike that of a cat, that's always probing and looking and jumping on a couple of hot stoves. there was this section that seemed impenetrable to me. it seemed to go on forever. they were the other tables. different from the batting average tables and box scores i would scrutinize with

regularity. when you read them from left to right, they made no sense at all. open, range, close, what open, what range, what closed? what were these strange things? why do they matter? i asked my dad, who i know dabbled in the in the stock market, who would occasionally get mad when he heard prices that were 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 or why it went out. i don't know if it popped it either. but i know it made him furious and i wanted to find out more about what these things are that made him react with such fury! he sat me down to explain that each of these lines represented the performance of a stock on a given day, each day. the open is when the stock opened up in the mornings. the range was how low and how high it traded during the day and the close was how much it was worth when the trading finished at the closing bell. it fascinated me. . how there be so many changes and

what did it mean to close? he described that people tried to figure out which stocks would go up at the close and he wanted to buy them, so they could make money in that increase in the range from the open to close. and this struck me as downright silly. i told him, i was always trying to figure out who was hot, who would go up in average, who would go down and what it means for the teams i like, specifically the phillies. he said, it's the same thing with stocks, you study the companies like you studied the players. some were doing just okay, some were hot as a pistol, some were just duds. i said i wanted to try to figure out which were going to go higher, just like everyone else was trying to figure out. i wanted to know if i could learn something from following the ranges, reading the tables. he said, why don't you try. it seemed in my house the radio was always on. we always watched the news while eating, even as i admit i hated it, because most of the news was about the war, meaning the war

in vietnam. and it seemed frightful and scary and very real life. . even when i was 9 years old, my mom was worried i would have to go to vietnam. hopefully, it was winding down when i got my draft number. but they mentioned the dow jones industrial average. and it either talked or showed the most active stocks and 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, well, 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 a stock, even as all i knew was the name, polaroid xerox national video. centex, 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 and a bunch of others. look at that, look at that conair. eastern, yeah, national, rca, admirable. after a year, i decided this was as cool a game as imaginable. i wanted to introduce it to my fifth grade class, so i did, bringing my ledger to show-and-tell. i have to admit that not everyone was as into it as i was. but the darnedest thing happened not long after. my dad's company was called national gift box and wrap corporation. then selling tape and a fancy ribbon that bowed easily. talking abo talking about sashine. right about fifth grade, pop came home with a new line of 3m he was selling, games.

he got into what is known as 3m book shelve games. he said i might want to learn more about how the stock market really worked and the company that created two games about business. acquire, about takeovers, which had all been the rage at the time, because it was the conglomerate age, and stocks and bonds, of which i am fortunate enough to have got an copy right here, courtesy of georgeman ecyst, who is producing "mad money," who gave it to me for the holidays. i almost cried when george gave it to me. i subsequently asked the ceo of 3m to bring the games back. i don't know if he will. apparently i don't even own the rights anymore. but the point of mentioning all of this, from my own makeshift stock game to stocks and bonds, which george bought off of ebay, is that the 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, given the budget pressures and tind the winding

down of different wars. have your kids track them. not the growth corporation of america, not the pioneer mutual fund. not the central city municipal bonds, but the 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 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 wanted to thank you for all you do. your books got me through a young age. i've been investing since i was quite young and wondering what kind of changes i should make to my investment process as i get older? >> it's a generational thing. i used to say, in your 50s, switch to 50% pond, 70% bond, no more. interest rates are way too low. what i need you to do is find conservative stocks, like master lin partnerships and shift

overtime to the master limited partnerships and you'll be able to pick up some income and do well. rick in arizona, rick? >> caller: hello, mr. cramer, how are you? >> real good. how about you? >> caller: i'm doing great, sir. my question i have for you is i have a couple of young children. i'm 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 that people need to know when they start learning about the market and investing in themselves. >> first thing they need to know is what they own. and the idea behind that is to own things like disny. that's why i always tell people, start with disney. domino's pizza, if you like domino's. mcdonnell's if you like mcdonald's. go to the mall, go to costco, go to places you're familiar with. read the annual and 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. over 20 million kids everyday in our country

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welcome back to a bizarry special "mad money." while i am not a dollar sign represented by a man or a stock symbol i have stumbled around the stock market in life to learn a two or thing. tonight you are getting that wisdom from the school of hard knocks. don't you love it when a player says the name and the school of hard knocks. that is where i attend. you are getting the on tv

version. we covered how i got involved, my fourth grade obsession with keeping a ledger to track stocks and then to learn how they trade through the greatest game on earth. it wasn't monopoly. it was stocks and bonds. but with its little certificates and its gameboards and its cards about news and how that would send a stock higher and lower, that is what this was all about. i left the stock market games behind me by the time i got to middle school which we then called junior high where my obsession was sports where i was second fastest guy in the school for ages. i ran school. then i worried about girls whose movements were more elusive than this stuff and the ranges of stocks. that was a random walk down springfield high main street. i couldn't win for losing. that is a different show.

my father did engrain in me the desire to save. early on i learned even in high school you have to save. i saved as i bussed tables at the old block and cleaver which we called the block and cleavage because we were hilariously stupid then. i sold cold soda and graduated into selling ice cream. very quickly at that job i learned the value of market power specifically cornering the market. and i pay people to give me the exclusive right to sell ice cream. on the 600 and 700 level of the stadium. can you imagine how much money can be made if you have the only franchise in the upper deck? by paying those guys not to sell ice cream against me i made fortunes except the one time they gave me only strawberry ice cream or the other time when

steve carl would pitch. he got players out so fast that i would get stuck with unsold ice cream. you have to buy the ice cream for the company and i would take a genuine beating. talk about learning how business worked. the shelf life of ice cream on a hot july night after the ninth inning is about as short as short can be. during the lightning round i might say your name. i learned names at the ballpark. i loved it first. i never forgot the monikers, bud, partner. i made a ton of money. i opened an account and contributed a little every week of my ballpark winnings. i met peter lynch who has written two investment books which remain two of the best of all time. they are the ones i usually tell people to get after they have

read my books and say i want to learn more about the stock market. i didn't save enough when i went to college. it went to my tuition and room and board. when i got out of college and after a lot of attempts to get a job in the newspaper business, i have every rejection letter. i ran a position making $156 a month. i keep a tattered pay stub in those days in my wallet to remind me how hard it was when i got started and 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 and got a job at the herald examiner. it was a horrible job. i was making $179 a week. it was in the town that was about four times as expensive as living in tallahassee. i found a bung alow apartment in the fairfax district.

around the corner from a pioneer chicken which was way too expensive for me to go to. a few weeks later i was broken into repeatedly. at the time i was assigned a story in san diego, a horrible school shooting. when i returned everything was gone, everything i had. so it began. my terrible but thrilling six months of living in my car basically trying to get by. the only real upside when you might have met a woman was easy to figure out the end of the night query, your place or mine? i know this isn't your normal behavior. as long as i knew my goal was to save up to get an apartment. people would take me in to get a shower and change and get a good night sleep. i still never quit saving. i remember cashing my paycheck and writing a check to fidelity

magellan fund. terrific savings on homeowners insurance and rent. how poor was i yet still putting money away? when i got mono i had no health care. the hmo had no branch where i was last stationed when the company put me on the road so i could submit expenses. i had to go to migrant farm workers clinic. i still put away money even as making weekly trips to the doctor. the upside of investing when living in your car giving money to the best stock picker of all time i managed 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 the fund well into the six figures. not because of my capital additions but because of the

power of compounding with an amazing investor at the helm. i just let it build. i want you to save no matter what. obviously, the earlier the better through thick and thin. when cnbc has all star managers on you don't have time or money to handle your stock portfolio now send the money in, as little or as much as you can. here is the real bottom line. if i can send checks to the fund when i was living in my car sick as a dog with jaundice liver kept warm by a bottle of jack and safe with a pistol by my side you can put money away, too. after the break i will try to make you more money.

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we are riding the delicious magical money mystery tour tonight. i am giving you the life lessons i have learned the hard way. i told you how to get your kids started early and how nothing should stop you from investing. if i can do it living in a 1977 ford fair mont you can put money away too. i want to tell you how i got started in individual stock picking, something you know i still love even after periods of pain, chaos. it is still totally worth while

if not lucrative. yes is the reason i pleev you watch. i used to have a radio show it was called radio money. if you are 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. when i got started in 1979 there was no such thing as online account. i chose to put my money in an individual stock account. when i first started i didn't know where to look for ideas so i turned to forbes. people at forbes please do not take this personally. i read an article about this orange grower in florida. i bought ten shares for $9.

a week later a frost hit and wiped out the whole crop. my investment was more than cut in half. i was completely devastated. >> the house of pain. >> but not defeated. i took the capital and went to forbes and bought seven shares of bobby brooks. my money was halved again. fortunately i had a decent job at a magazine. i was making 20 gs and living in a studio. the cheap $400 a month rent twice the rent for a beautiful one bedroom in tallahassee allowed me to replenish my stock. i was on the road quite a bit. after a hard night on the town researching a story in kentucky i fell in love with the breakfast at bob evans.

i visited the huge fabulous mid town manhattan, one of the big lions in front of it and devoured everything i could. they had magazines with articles, investment publications with write ups that allowed me to compare with other companies in the industry. i knew kw had a good one. i bought 20 shares. the stock went up immediately and then the stock split. i figured out know what you own. like it even. what did i know about growing oranges or women's fashion? a good plate of scrambled sausages served at an attractive setting with a nice waitress, a company with a long transition of good service, that was for me. next up, standard pressed steel. that became sps technology from my old hometown that made

fasteners and screws for airplanes. a buddy from mine from high school told me they were hiring for mad and wanted to know if i wanted a job. i had a good job. solid company, no debt. nothing in print about the hiring push. no one had that skinny. you know it doubled not long after and by that point, 23 years later it was acquired. and a quality company. the best investment ideas come from what you know melded with information gleamed from public sources even if they are as late and hard to source as taking a trip to the public library. i didn't like the random way i was making money through this. a friend from home's lucky call about jobs so random.

a hearty breakfast. i was thinking there has to be a more methodical way. at the time i was covering mergers, profiling some, following deals they were on. it seemed every other deal was in the oil patch. one after another after another, smaller to mid sized oil companies were being acquired. all i was doing was standing around writing about it. so i went back to the library, took out editions of value line, a stock research magazine and checked out the pages devoted to oil companies and cross referenced them to other research to see which could be acquired either because they were not public or because they fit the size of parameters. i settled on an oil company in indonesia. i didn't have to wait long until

it was bought and i almost doubled my money. buy companies that would do well on their own but still under managed which has been the consensus i have found by reading articles. that meant another oil company with bigger scale could do more. as much as i had hit winners i was distraught that i had given up the ghost in the first few trades. at the time i had been hanging around the track, the track on weekends, mostly aquaduct and i learned how to handicap by reading books and picking winners. they may be the second best. they teach discipline, how to identify the best thoroughbreds. going to out of the way tracks where information was less well known and not betting on every horse. find where the payoff was more sure and bet big.

cut your losses if you are having a bad run. everyone of the lessons can be applied to the stock market. you can make a huge spin when you know what you are doing. don't just gamble on stocks for the excitement or the fun of it. be disciplined. don't let your losses pile up. after five years of professional journalism i decided to go back to law school. i saved enough to pay for my first year all in the stock market because i never had enough if i kept it in a savings account. an index fund would have made me nothing. you want to get started, go small. invest in what you know and research in intensity. i got old data from the public library. now it is as simple as a key stroke. the information is free including up to the minute financials and the conference calls that i tell you are musts if you are going to know what you are doing. simple?

no. lucrative. you bet it is. frank in arizona. frank? >> caller: whenever i am considering buying or selling a stock i look at the big price and ask price. sometimes the ask price is narrow and sometimes it is wide. how is that information useful? >> if you like the stock i will tell you that is irrelevant. what matters is because if you want to hold the stock for a while you have to hold it and forget about that spread. i used to spread buying stocks that had like they could drive a truck through them, maybe a dollar spread. things are much easier now. oh my god! look. you need to see this. show 'em the curve. ♪ do you know what this means? the greater the curvature, the bigger the difference.

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tonight's show is all about you learning from my attendance at the university of financial hard knocks with a major in investing. i have taken you through the importance of getting started early and saving no matter what. i have shown you how to spot winners and stay disciplined all through looking at actual examples in my life. now i will give you a sense of how to become a trader if you want to and be a good one at that. "mad money" has changed and changed time and time again over

the years. it has been on for so long. and i have deliberately skewed it in the last 500 shows away from trading and more oriented in investing. i have done so because there are so many more obstacles to trading than investing. you have to look for positions to the point it is hard to do. you can't do your job and follow the market. there are so many people with great sets of tools and they are always going to beat you. so many products to move stocks around like toys and you are going one-on-one with the big boys if you attempt to try trading at home or work. it is almost a suckers game. there are some advantages that you have now that i didn't have when i started trading in my law school dorm in '81. it is much lower so you can get in and out. i'm not worried about the spreads as i said earlier. the information you need is on

your personal computer or your smart phone. i would have to call brokers all day watching the ticker. and 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. i would have to wait on one pay phone while one called i was begging to get on the phone. 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 there was a ton of down time and a good business library across the river. up to date quarterly. those little plastic things. i possessed the best publicly available information around at that time. the first thing i decided to do given the circumstances was to work on finding one trading idea per week. you can't be all over the map if

you are doing this as a hobby. i figured i can't take a lot of chances until i knew what i was doing. that is a valuable lesson. i have a ton of ideas looking for stocks that had catalysts and possibly mergers. and an article on the front page of the "new york times" might be talking about a break through in medicine. a brokerage report might talk about a potential oil find. i wrote a newsletter called "mr. bullish" which i mailed to my parents once a week and articulated the thesis behind my trade. i used to type it on my type writer. i would do no trade if i couldn't explain what the company did and why i liked it. i had that level of discipline. no buying of anything that didn't have an exit strategy.

i had to have a strategy from the moment i put the trade on. an important lesson made disciplined by the existence of an existing thesis before i pulled the trigger. you must trade with confidence. you can be shaken up by the broader market. you want to trade with confidence? ask yourself would you be willing to put a recommendation on your voice mail. i like memories at $32 ahead of its next quarter. i did that, too. and i had that level of conviction about my pick of the week which is important to possess. i was putting my money where my mouth was and managed to augment the winnings with work i was able to get. some legal work from a professor. it wasn't before long that a publisher tried to get me to

write a piece. i neglected to call him back. he got three weeks of trades off the answering machine and told me to meet him at a coffee house. he said he made more money off of my messages. he said he had confidence in me. after i gave him tug of war he did give me a check for half a million dollars. that was real money back then. i had it in my hands. it was like too hot for the touch. i set up another account. i went right to work trading. almost immediately i lost a ton of it and i can see how i would have to wash dishes at marty's house for about 125 years to make back the 70 gs i had just blown to smithereens. my mistake, as clint eastwood

told us. a man has to know his own limitations. you can't trade a huge amount of money at once. you have to do so after you had ideas. an entry point that was reasonable and an exit point that was planned. knowing that you would be gone whether it worked or not to keep that discipline in tact. i violated my own rules and i had blown it. i confessed to marty my sins and said he should take what is left of the money back. instead he wanted to give me more money. he was betting that i learned my lessons. he was right. i then reverted to my old style of trying to be right about one idea at a time and keeping the rest in cash and going big when i had the most conviction like any good trader would do. i made it back while i also paper invested, a more active

but true portfolio. that would become the beginning of my investing career which you will hear about. if you are going to trade make sure you have a catalyst, an exit point where something is supposed to happen and you are out of the stock either way because you are trading not investing. you need conviction and you have to ask yourself would you be willing for the world to hear it's me. i'm not here right now but i want you to take a swing at disney ahead of the analyst meeting. if you can do those things start small. give it a try. stick with cramer. (vo) rush hour around here starts at 6:30 a.m. - on the nose.

but for me, it starts with the opening bell. and the rush i get, lasts way more than an hour. (announcer) at scottrade, we share your passion for trading. that's why we've built powerful technology to alert you to your next opportunity. because at scottrade, our passion is to power yours. [ squeaking ] [ water dripping ]

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really? yeah, i'd like that. who are you talking to? uh, it's jake from state farm. sounds like a really good deal. jake from state farm at three in the morning. who is this? it's jake from state farm. what are you wearing, jake from state farm? [ jake ] uh... khakis. she sounds hideous. well she's a guy, so... [ male announcer ] another reason more people stay with state farm. get to a better state. ♪ welcome back to the special "mad money" where i am teaching you life lessons and investing from my life. we are up to the professional grade, my time when i started at goldman sachs. i had been courting and been courted by goldman sachs for three years before i got a job in what was then called security sales, helping individuals and

small institutions manage their money. i got a ton of history in those years. you can always get the skinny in my golden days but that is 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, not just to give you a cool funny story. i will dispense with the anecdotes and try to teach you how to make money with the events that transpired at goldman sachs. i am about making money. first that is 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. i had the best teachers in the world at goldman sachs. one of the great hedgefund managers of our time, lee cooper, research director at goldman put on an investing clinic almost every day which i never missed a session.

hardly an hour went by when i didn't hear a new great idea to explore. you know who i really learned from? my customers. wealthy individuals from all walks of life. it was something i learned that is individuals can and do beat the market quite regularly. why can't they know it? if they only worked at goldman with me they would see it and know what i saw. they are all theoretical. when i was at goldman i had what was known as nondiscretionary accounts. i wasn't allowed to invest others money with my own ideas unless i could win them over to make the purpose. i was on commission and made money only on buys and sells. there was no 1% fee or 3% with the wins. that is where i learned how important it was to talk over a

story with an individual and be able to articulate it in a way that made sense. can you do that to someone if you were picking a stock? you had to know your stuff. i often asked questions about whether they knew enough about the stocks, their stocks, the ones they suggested to me that they wanted to buy. i wanted them to be as educated as possible about my idea or their ideas. i knew that stocks go down. and i knew that if it went down -- well, if it went up it would be their idea. and if it went down it is 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 i figured out how humbling this business could be. almost had stocks had tremendous tail winds. when one of your ideas went against you you had to get on the horn and explain why the person should buy more or

whether they should cut their losses. that is why you always have to recognize how fallible investing can be and understand what to do when stocks go against you. i learned to let your gains run. i learned the hard way. many clients were terrific business people who didn't know much about stocks but had been fabulous building up great wealth through actual companies. i had this real estate tycoon who worked hard to get where he was. i was working hard to try to get him as a client, trying to win him over. it took me ages and ages. i told him when i finally convinced him to work with me that i would be judicious and work hard and get it right by him. he said no trading, jim. i want longer term investments. at the time i liked kimberly-clark, the paper

company, one i have liked forever. still do. i told this client that i thought this one 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. i called him and i said bob i want to ring the register. i want to sell the 1,000 shares of kimberly-clark. he was furious. he told me that i had said kimberly would be good for the long term and he wasn't the least bit interested. then he questioned my integrity and wanted to know if i was churning him meaning i was just trying to generate commissions with his money. 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 is a sign you are erasing a loss. you don't want to turn an investment into a trade. you have a good one, let it run. bob was right. kimberly ultimately doubled. i was vindicated despite myself. i learned the science behind building a portfolio. a lot of my business is contacting people who just came through a great deal of cash like a powerball winner or somebody who would sell his company to yahoo. these people tended to be rather unsophisticated about their money. i regarded my first job as listening to their needs, trying to figure out what they wanted, where they can serve, that they want capital preservation. they didn't want to risk their money or were they aggressive? did they want capital appreciation? build the welt quickly.

i tried to get to know them and urged them to get to know themselves. you may think you want to get rich quick but you want to get rich carefully. ask yourself, can you handle the pain of a market decline? would you prefer your money to appreciate slowly and get most of it from fixed income meaning bonds or dividends? do you want to participate in new issues? do you want to try to hit it out of the park with some. maybe i'm not the right guy for you. many of you are familiar with these lessons. i try to teach you to know yourself and know what you can handle and can't. this is when i learned the value of diversification when i got to goldman sachs. you have to understand these were different days. you can have oil kaechs double and double and double again. we figured out how big the fines were. the fines were pretty available back then. everybody got caught up in oils. i wanted oils for my personal

account, every day seemed like a great day in oil. oil services, oil drillers, oil platforms, you name it. then one day oil, the commodity plummeted in price. the saudis started pumping like mad, global tensions were settled and cooled. next thing you know the bull moved to a bear. those who owned nothing but oils were crushed. i understood first-hand the cost of diversification. while it violated the rules i never intentionally avoided diversification. i almost lost everything and i worked hard to get here is the bottom line. i learned from my early days at goldman sachs the corps principles of investing. and that included no margin line. consider yourself the customer of this show and remember all of my investors who consistently beat the market on their own in

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i like to say there is always a bull market somewhere and i promise to try to find it and i promise to try to find it just for you right here on "mad >> narrator: in this episode of "american greed"... could this man be brooklyn's own bernie madoff? >> people who lived in that neighborhood never conceived that this schlubby-looking guy was going to hurt them. >> narrator: because, unlike madoff, philip barry's no fancy billionaire flaunting the high life in front of his victims. he's one them. >> he was wrapping himself in the mantle of the hardworking work ethic of that neighborhood and using it to lure people in. >> narrator: and he's quietly building what may be the longest-running ponzi scheme in history.