I Quit Half-Way Through

I found the book to be mostly written about what a great investor Jim was. I didn't feel that he contributed much substance to the book beyond what should be common sense to most investors.

There also seemed to be some conflict between what he says on his TV show and what he wrote in the book, especially when he pumps stocks on TV that he owns in his trust.

Not as Good as Confessions of a Street Addict

Investing Rule Number One: No book can teach you how to make money in the stock market. You might as well try reading a book on how to win the lottery.

Of course, this isn't James J. Cramer's rule. Cramer's rules are sensible and conservative. Do your research, start investing early, be a bull or a bear but don't be a pig, blah, blah, blah. He tries to get our attention with the "unconventional" advice to speculate with some of our investment money, but that's what investing is - speculating. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, blue chips, they're all risky.

Don't read Cramer's book to learn how to invest. Read it because the writing is snappy and he tells good stories. Another reviewer compared listening to Cramer's radio show to being in a pinball machine. I haven't caught Cramer's radio or TV shows, but that's an accurate description of Cramer's pre-Bubble ramblings on TheStreet.com, as well as his style in Confessions of a Street Addict.

In fact, Confessions is a better book than Jim Cramer's Real Money. There is no tedious investing advice cluttering up Confessions. And in Confessions he doesn't mention his radio show by name and 800 number every few paragraphs, if only because he didn't have a radio show then.

In Jim Cramer's Real Money, Cramer recalls some of his most fabulous successes and his most egregious mistakes. It's fun to read, but one of the most revealing passages is almost an aside, in which he tells us that although his wife, the Trading Goddess was a phenomenal trader back in her Wall Street days, she has failed miserably at at-home online trading. Makes you wonder if even the best advice of a former Wall Street broker and hedge fund manager just doesn't apply to the average investor trading out of his $10,000 IRA on E*Trade.

Way too basic for Cramer

I purchased and read this book thinking it would be similar to his last book, Confessions of a street addict. This book contained the same information in a Finance 101 text book (albeit much, much cheaper). Going in depth talking about how to calculate P/E ratios was just not what I was looking for. If you are looking for a basic (very, very basic) overview of technical and fundemental analysis, by all means. I was hoping for more advanced substance, hoping Cramer would share a little more insight, insight that I am not really sure exists in him anymore.

The worst part is that he goes on and on about a how he is going to tell you all about a topic later on in the book, but then the book ends and you are still looking for that info from chapter 1.

People reguard Cramer as a "market guru" for all the wrong reasons. This book is not helping his cause. He is about as good as picking stocks and investing as the monkey throwing darts at the Money and Investing pages of the Wall Street Journal.