Reading Jim Cramer’s Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World is like overhearing a barstool monologue by a streetwise MBA from the School of Hard Knocks: if you interrupt with a dumb question, be prepared for a blunt answer that may blow your assumptions clear out of the proverbial water. Cramer is co-founder of TheStreet.com, author of Confessions of a Street Addict, columnist for New York magazine, and hyperactive host of CNBC’s Mad Money and the nationally syndicated radio program Real Money. In Real Money, Cramer presents a regimen to riches for investors with bloated theories who feel defeated by every decline in the stock market. Cramer doesn’t believe in the current if you can’t beat the market become the market via index funds mentality. Instead, he sets about teaching how he made hundreds of millions as a professional investor using common sense and simple arithmetic precepts that no longer stump my 10-year-old. He punches back at some arrogant and dumb theories in his Ten Commandments of Trading (tips are for waiters; don’t trade headlines; never turn a buy into an investment) and 25 Investing Tips to Live By (look for broken stocks, not broken companies; why discipline trumps conviction; hope is not part of the equation). Cramer’s cocky style retrains the amateur in how stocks are meant to be traded and how to spot stock moves as well as those topping or bottoming out before they happen, perhaps turning some of this century’s reluctant investors into people who might actually enjoy managing their own retirement fund.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
