You replied to a post above about the inverse ETF, suggesting that that poster was cherry-picking dates. The entire point of the inverse ETF was to take advantage of the ARKK's unrealistic returns in the preceding year.
Just for kicks, though, here's ARKK versus VTI and cash since April 2020.[1]
Yes ARKK has crashed spectacularly but that wasn't the point of the original comment. You would be down now betting against it earlier, it's not like it never gained anything prior.
Take I dunno, Bitcoin. As you increase the time window, showing a net loss is less and less possible. I'm not a crypto bull and I think it will tend towards zero someday but this is inarguable using current historicals.
> you increase the time window, showing a net loss is less and less possible
The solution is flow weighting [1]. Fewer dollars went into Bitcoin when it was small than when it was big. (By definition.) So you weight the larger flows more heavily.
There is arbitrariness around choosing the delineations. But the basic idea is comparisons across totally-different fund-flow regimes are meaningless for purposes of explaining the present state of the world.
As you increase the time window, the possibility that the wallet is abandoned, the wallet owner is dead, or the bitcoins get scammed or lost in a exchange collapse quickly reaches 100%.
But survival chance is an important part of the asset. In the trading card / comic case, destruction of most of the asset is a major source of price appreciation.
It may be true for Bitcoin/crypto too.
Can't buy what nobody owns, and bitcoin does have builtin caps for total amount with no way to recover coins sent to lost wallets. It's a nice clean proof that the price must trend to $0.
Your numbers are problematic but you put time on the argument, which is different.
The claim was that all stores of wealth have those properties. Crypto can suffer them faster but someone's real estate investment from say, the 2013 in Ukraine, 2003 in Syria, 1993 in Kosovo, 1983 in Rhodesia... Such things aren't immune.
Heck even without war the rules of who can invest in what can change and your assets can be seized like in Venezuela.
It's more common in crypto but these problems are perennial.
The primary argument against crypto is that it shows why an open, stable, well structured professional governing state is crucial to the preservation of property rights. It painfully highlights all the problems that happen when you create these assets in a way that's ideologically against statecraft.
You can see it as the crypto bros are reinventing government without using the g word as they discover the problems that are solved by regulations from first principles.
> The primary argument against crypto is that it shows why an open, stable, well structured professional governing state is crucial to the preservation of property rights. It painfully highlights all the problems that happen when you create these assets in a way that's ideologically against statecraft.
I mean, that was my point. It wasn't meant to be a 'truism', it was meant to illustrate that your investment making money isn't nearly as valuable if that value is lost because of problems that don't exist with other investments.
If I put money into a fund and the owner dies I can still get my money through the courts. If a crypto wallet owner dies and has the keys in his head, it is gone forever. Same thing with options for investing. If I have to use a crypto exchange to do my trading, then the chances of losing my assets increases exponentially.
> it was meant to illustrate that your investment making money isn't nearly as valuable if that value is lost because of problems that don't exist with other investments.
Risk vs return is a fundamental proposition of all investments. Bitcoin certainly has higher risk, but the fundamental idea that risky investments need more return to justify them applies everywhere not just bitcoin.
Yes, but that aspect is completely lost when people make the argument that if you bought bitcoin then on a long time scale you wouldn't have lost money. What are the chances that you would have lost the bitcoin through other means (not price)? This never gets mentioned.
Thumb drives don't hold data forever. Safe deposit boxes are not insured for more than a trivial amount and the contents get lost/removed all the time.
Anyway you admitted that it is a riskier investment to hang on to then handwaved it when I said that no one is taking it into account.
> Thumb drives don't hold data forever. Safe deposit boxes are not insured for more than a trivial amount and the contents get lost/removed all the time.
This is downright silly. Might as well say if an asteroid hit the earth your money probably isn't safe.
> Anyway you admitted that it is a riskier investment to hang on
Than what? I admited that all investments have risk, and that like all investments some investments are safer than bitcoin and some are more dangerous. I would say the same thing about literally any investment. Even a savings account has some (miniscule) risk
> handwaved it when I said that no one is taking it into account.
You haven't presented any evidence that nobody is taking it into account. Obviously some people are and some aren't, but i'm not sure that distinguishes it from most other investments. You could argue that there is a higher porportion of people not taking it appropriately into account with bitcoin relative to say an index etf, which probably is true, but that is a hell of a goal post move from ">90% probability for crypto over a ten year period" to go to zero due to risk of investment being stolen.
> This is downright silly. Might as well say if an asteroid hit the earth your money probably isn't safe.
Um, no? Flash memory cells hold a voltage. That voltage is not going to stay in there forever. It eventually leaks out and your data is corrupted. This isn't usually a problem because the cells refresh when powered on, and most people don't use flash drives for a decade -- but put it in a deposit box for more than a few years and you better cross your fingers when you plug it back in.
"During normal operation, the flash drive firmware routinely refreshes the cells to restore lost charge. However, when the flash is not powered the state of charge will naturally degrade with time."[0]
> Than what?
Than nothing. My point was that people say 'if you bought bitcoin you couldn't have lost money because on aggregate it has gone up'. This is incredibly misleading because many people bought bitcoin and lost it in an exchange collapse, or families had their investments disappear because the person managing it died or the wallet got phished with no recourse, or they forgot the passphrase, etc. This is a risk that is not mentioned when people proclaim the great investment that is bitcoin.
> You haven't presented any evidence that nobody is taking it into account.
You think over 90% of people who bought Bitcoin in 2013 are down on their investment?
In reality the most common regret they have is selling their coins when they should have kept them or trading them for newer hype coins that turned out to be vaporware.
I like absolutely hate bitcoin, but the probability of that happening to a savy investor is pretty low. Definitely not 90%. The probability of an unsavy investor being parted from their money is pretty high in all forms of investment.
While in fiat currencies it may go on to inheritance feeding the market with liquidity, unused Bitcoin does nothing, so demand being equal price would increase.
I continue to believe crypto operates like a collectibles market; similar to stamps, beanie babies, rare coins, baseball cards, etc.
In this model, the "cards" are the actual unit coins and the "players" are the type of coin (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc).
So long as there's a vibrant enthusiast community, the assets will hold some value but except for a few mainstays, these things tend to atrophy over time.
For instance, yesterday I was helping an 80 year old neighbor clean out her garage. I found some wonderful vintage RadioShack calculators from the late 1970s. They're extremely rare and also, extremely worthless. The supply and price of something can both tend towards zero.
But you may be overlooking that they're also liquid, popular, benefit from network effects, the supply is algorithmically defined in many cases, and mostly fungible.
This distinction is weird to me. Bitcoin is also created by fiat. If trust in government is lost, there is no governance nor money. If trust in bitcoin is lost, there are no running nodes nor tokens.
That's an argument using spherical cows and frictionless pulleys. As you increase the time window for Bitcoin the net loss is less possible only for the rarified and smaller and smaller population that owned (and held) Bitcoin as you go further back in time. For Satoshi Nakamoto there's no net loss in Bitcoin holdings but most people aren't Satoshi Nakamoto.
Not to say that all forms of cryptographic currency will, but Bitcoin only serves as a value store.
The enthusiasts don't actually pay for things in Bitcoin but instead horde it so it doesn't really serve a society function as much as it services an ideology.
The Bitcoin core, the true adherents, are approximately the same percentage of the public that did Liberty Dollars; sovereign citizen types that maintain sprawling websites attacking the Federal Reserve or proffering quack miracle cures.
It's a weird sideshow of frauds, scammers, ponzi schemes, multilevel marketing, occult and conspiracy theorists, the kind that listened to Bill Cooper on shortwave ... That's what will eventually be left propping up the value so it's whatever that group can muster. The boom/bust cycle of Bitcoin being approximately 4 years and aligning with presidential elections could be a coincidence... Let's see what 2025 brings.
Regardless, someday Bitcoin will be integrated into their paranoid delusions as part of the enemy plot and these last holdouts will abandon it.
But that's the long game. I might be talking 25 years here. Or maybe 25 months, who knows?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This seems like a pretty straightforward viewpoint to me. Not that there aren't other valid viewpoints on the same topics, but I totally get where you're coming from.
It was the purest bunk. Sincere bunk, well meaning bunk, but still bunk. It was proven wrong and wrong and wrong again, but not only did some people take their beliefs to their graves, but an offshoot is still going more than 150 years later.
Because why wouldn't it? Nobody seems to want or need bitcoin for anything in particular. Even as a store of value, there are better and more established stores of value.
I don't think it would, because all it would take is some people to want to buy it for speculation purposes, and it would have nonzero price.
Sure, it's a dead asset producing nothing and having not much use. But it's easier to transfer than stocks or bonds, and does not suffer of unexpected supply inflation.
The strategy logic is a bit different than the ETF is being rolled out - this one shorts all the tickers he is talking about the most (whether he is bearish or bullish) and hedges with a long position on the market.
Buying inverse funds is a bad idea. They suffer from exponential decay over long time periods.
Consider that the 1x (non-inverse fund) goes up 10% in a day. At the same time the inverse fund, which tracks it, falls 10%. Now consider the following day that the 1x fund falls 9%, to its original price. Consequently, the inverse fund goes back up 9%, but it's about 2% lower than its starting position. So you still lose money even though the original 1x fund is unchanged.
The better strategy is to buy puts or short the non-inverse, 1x version.
they mention it pretty early on in the article. The same firm created both
> An enterprising and clearly meme-savvy fund manager out there, Tuttle Capital Management has actually filed prospectuses for two Cramer-tracking funds:
The Inverse Cramer ETF (SJIM)
The Long Cramer ETF (LJIM)
> In retrospect, I'm not surprised. Tuttle Capital is known for its hilarious yet strangely effective ETF lineup. Case in point, their earlier Short Innovation Daily ETF (SARK) that bet against Cathie Wood and her funds is still up 73% year-to-date.
What you think about Cathie Woods is irrelevant to ARK. It's still heavily TSLA, and all of the highs and lows are basically because ole Musky's car company had rollercoaster valuations.
Ideally, that should net out to an expensive market-neutral fund with 0% expected returns minus the management fees and transaction costs, the latter of which could be really high.
There are actually ETFs that contain themselves (or rather, ETF X is e.g. 10% ETF Y which is 10% ETF X. So long as the total amount of X owned per unit of X is less than 1 (in absolute value), the arithmetic mostly works out. Though I don’t know if any ETFs directly contain themselves.
But at the same time it reminds me of a certain type of World Cup bet, where you win mega $$ if you correctly pick the winners of all 64 matches. But you also win the same mega $$ if every single one of your picks loses, which of course is just as hard to achieve. (I forget how they handle ties but you get the idea.)
All of which is to say, if Jim Cramer has no expertise in picking stocks, investing broadly in his picks is not much different from an index fund, you'll just roughly track the market. Whereas if he actively gets you to consistently and reliably lose money on high-volume publicly traded investments, then that's still (counterintuitively) a signal that somehow he knows something.
and/or his public predictions influence the markets
I'm pretty sure multiple data vendors compete to sell low-latency feeds of his picks, given his popularity.
If a Cramer-tracking ETF underperforms the market, it's entirely possible that the ETF enters the market late (after the market has mostly priced in the Cramer-bump) and holds during the reversion to the mean. Though, I haven't looked into it.
I haven't looked at him very closely, but I'm not sure how to read Jim Cramer.
Just observing his onscreen personality at face value: He's very loud and bold, erratic, yelling ridiculous things at the audience in a Philly accent (no offense to Philly on that ... it just lends itself to a particular stereotype, like he may as well be at a bar talking about the Eagles). When his investments are bad, you can just say oh, the guy is a blowhard, not basing his opinions on keen intellectual insight; it's all entertainment purposes and so on.
But there's another cynical angle that enters, maybe it's paranoid to say but I think it's plausible: Does he have personal stake in his advice? Does he have some connections at these companies telling him to boost the stocks on air? That would enter into the realm of fraud. I guess when people confidently urge others to make ruinous financial decisions, that kind of concern always enters into it.
Not speculating whether Cramer or acquaintances of his have a stake on the stocks or not. But from what I remember from posts on WSB his advice if you'd follow through a) doesn't give very significant changes and b) rather goes in the negative direction. To me it seems it's hard to separate from noise. Of course this might be explained by stating a free money paradox. (If everyone invested...) But also it seems his advice is actually rather random and just fits an entertainment narrative at best or sales pitch at worst.
I'm not huge into finance, can you tell me what it's supposed to give me an idea about? It seems like he's talking about his early career in the context of possible advice for people starting out.
Some of it is career advice that would be applicable to other fields too -- talking about education, building connections and networks, getting your foot in the door at a company, etc.
There was an NLP based trading firm about 10 years ago that would run sentiment analysis over articles from industry analysts. According to someone that worked there, some of the most useful signal came from analysts that had strong negative correlations with future performance.
The "innocent" explanation is that they might be particularly susceptible to "human" biases (e.g. loss aversion) while still extremely knowledgeable about the market, and that they represent a more extreme version of "human" market errors broadly that eventually correct themselves. Which would be a fascinating hypothesis to explore.
While a less innocent explanation is intentional market manipulation, of course.
If anybody knows of research along these lines I'd be extremely curious.
The basic reason is that in whatever sector that is 'hot' the shares get overpriced and a lot of companies pile into the hot sector increasing competition and also hyping the sector further using investor money. Examples being dot com stocks in the late 90s, crypto stocks recently and probably AI stocks in the near future.
Also it's worth bearing in mind how "articles from industry analysts" get paid for. Typically from ad revenue from the types of companies featured.
I think it works more like a law of thermodynamics, where no matter how you arrange the elements or what signs you flip, whether you follow his advice or inverse it, any stock betting system based on Jim Cramer is guaranteed to lose money.
He was essentially teaching algo trading, and also tracked wallstreet bets sentiment analysis. He went so far as to pitch his investment strategy to serious tech investors (it was ahead of the nasdaq at the time). His Wallstreet bets tracker had been tanking so he focused on the fish investing fund, but I was waiting for one of the investors to suggest he inverse wallstreet bets and make a lot of money.
Short WSB is a difficult fund to put together. The meme stocks are often very expensive to borrow (partly because lots of other people are in the same trade).
The best way to run a short ETF (on something where no futures market exists) is to also manage the long version of the fund and cap interest in the short fund to be less than or equal to the long. If it's a serious investment it's likely the long fund naturally has more interest anyway.
There are charts from GS or JPM (I can't remember which one) which show the performance of the most shorted stocks in the market. It's a straight line down (something like -7% annualized) and it also underperforms during crashes like 2008, 2020... Even including gamestop and AMC you only see a tiny rally in 2021 but the general line is down. Meaning it is a very effective hedge against the stock market.
The explaination could simply be that mainly only smart money short stocks, and they tend to be pretty good at figuring out issues in companies that are not yet fully priced in.
If I were to run a short ETF, I would add filters such as market cap, short interest and day to covers to avoid liquidity issues and squeezes, and/or play it through options structures. Like, it would have been stupid to be short GME when it had 300% of float as short interest. But it is probably fine in a lot of case with a sufficiently low day-to-covers and short interest. A more active strategy would be to monitor the Fee Rate which gives a good indication of the stock supply and is more "real time" than short interest data which often lags a few days/weeks.
> It's a straight line down (something like -7% annualized)
So if you pay 3% borrow costs you do worse than putting your money in Treasuries? 3% seems conservative for the most shorted stocks, I checked a few on [0] - TSLA 0.25%, WE 4%, AMC 143%. Uncorrelated returns are great but this is not the most compelling sales pitch for a short fund. Better to use this information to underweight those stocks in your long portfolio.
All of my shorts are 0.5% or below, most of them are 0.25%. I also said you would have to monitor fee rates. And market cap as well (for example AMC would be too small in your example).
Treasuries are quite correlated with the stock market as both depend on liquidity, so it's not exactly a hedge, although they tend to do better during recessions, they will go down during unexpected hikes.
> If one were to have $100 million invested in the Speaker of the House's stock-picking abilities at the beginning of 2019, the same investment would compound to $192 million as of today, slightly off the November high, when the portfolio hit its peak of almost $309 million. Pelosi's strategy generated a negative year-to-date return of 36.04%, accompanied by a negative one-year return of 36.61%, both slightly underperforming the S&P 500 (SPY). - Q3 2022
I wanted to take a look at this because given stock trades are public you'd think there'd be an ETF to track trades for the speaker of the house, but in reality it seems like people wildly overstate the profitability of their winning trades and understate their losses because "slightly underperforming the S&P 500 (SPY)" doesn't make the same headlines. In the long term, they appear to be no better off than the average portfolio picker.
The last time I looked into this, the information on trades by members of the congress is delayed. Something like we know in which quarter they traded but not on which exact day, so the ETF doesn't really track their returns
they track "usual whale" trades, large or weird trades, often by well known figures. Congress is an obvious and easy one to track.
However, they're not required to disclose the trades in real-time, so following it closely may not really help and may hurt in the long run, as quick blips pops or runs fizzle out or revert as the market starts to react.
IIRC there is a 3-day or more lag. And that's optional, I think there is a 30 day requirement?
Especially in the world of finance, I don't think you can possibly go on TV, in good faith, and make any recommendation other than "hire and expert" or "invest long term." It's fundamentally too late of someone is telling you about it on TV; could be a great company to invest in but not short term.
The problem I have with #4 is that you're picking a false expert. The word "expert" is supposed to mean something. Experts are usually not the people that do television for a living.
And with #3 above #4, you're essentially considering yourself as the top expert. Those should be flipped, and greater care taken to identify and qualify expertise.
Distinguishing between a false expert vs a true expert is the same problem as picking a good stock vs a bad stock. There have been an unlimited number of studies done on the matter, and the overwhelming consensus is that professional stock pickers as a whole can be beaten by goldfish when it comes to making predictions.
The real experts are not the people making predictions about price movements. The real experts are usually making below-average salaries as postdoctorate fellows. I'm not sure that they're that hard to identify.
Why would you believe that? A post doctoral fellow would have very little knowledge of the markets.
Markets are not just random walks, there is edge to be gained with information and that information can be quite expensive to acquire and refine. A fellow would not have the resources to do that.
If every investor was buying only index funds, all it takes is one investor to find one stock that has great fundamentals and is undervalued relative to its performance.
They will beat out the other investors on this one pick.
Once someone starts winning and getting a better return the money flocks to them and away from the index funds. That then causes index funds to rebalance, which causes those investors looking for a better return to find other stocks, rinse and repeat.
It will never be the case that everyone is investing only in index funds. It would be so easy to beat out everyone else in that scenario.
To this point, a fund, esp. a big one, isn't even trying to find that value -- they're looking to benchmark and spread money, not pan for gold.
So in a lot of cases they'll miss out on those hidden gems. And, again, they're not in the hidden gem business, they're in the min-risk, capture broad gains business.
Lots of funds are focused on capital preservation - if the market is down 20% in a year, a funds goal will be to be even (0%) or maybe down slightly like 3-4%.
They may be less focused of being up 20% when the market is up 10% and instead may only be up 8%.
> If every single stock investor bought index funds
Well they don't, so why discuss meaningless hypotheticals? Yes this advice doesn't make sense in a world where there are no active funds, no wealth managers, where day trading doesn't exist, hedge funds all shut down, there are no quants, no HFT, no one trading derivatives...but until that happens I'm still telling the average person to buy index funds.
#3 should be the best if you are actually knowledgeable. The problem is a lot of people are basically fooling themselves into being knowledgeable. There is a lot of dumb randomness in stocks but over a longer term stock prices tend to somehow follow underlying economic realities.
But, sadly, the stock market is a merciless test proctor. You may do all the work you think is necessary, you may research until the cows come home and you may still be wrong because you read things that were biased, you did not look at things in the proper perspective, there was some important discovery somewhere that changed the industry, geopolitics, etc.
So even if you are planning on doing your own research you should be well diversified.
Also, do not listen to experts! The stock market is one of the few fields where "experts" will intentionally try to mislead you. Always try to get primary material, or as close to primary material as possible. And do not fool yourself into thinking that reading a bunch of secondary expert articles, or listening to Cramer or other experts is doing research. That's like hoping to become a paleontologist by watching friends.
Until you realize we're entering uncharted territory as the index funds no longer represent external indices but a huge portion of money flows and are becoming feedback loops.
So what? Index funds still ultimately own shares in a diverse portfolio of companies. That's why they were a good idea in the first place, and it's why they are still a good idea.
If your argument is that this feedback loop is distorting the value of the companies index funds invest in, such distortion would impact anyone who buys stock in those companies whether or not they do it through index funds. Therefore, picking and choosing individual stocks doesn't become more attractive even if we know index funds distort the market, unless you only invest in stocks that are not owned by index funds -- good luck with that.
> their earlier Short Innovation Daily ETF (SARK) that bet against Cathie Wood and her funds is still up 73% year-to-date.
Only because this article was written in October of last year. Since then SARK is down 30% (along with the rest of the market).
You can tell that the entire investment services industry is totally fucked up simply by the form of the information they put out. Investment returns calculated over a single time period is a case in point. What you really want to know is the expected value of the return given random entry and exit dates, but no one publishes that information. Another example: investment recommendations are published as buy and sell recommendations, but that is totally wrong. For any stock, there is a price at which it is advantageous to buy it, and a price at which is it advantageous to sell it, and a range in between where you should hold. But no one publishes those price ranges, they just say "buy", "sell" and "hold" as if the price is irrelevant, or on the obviously false assumption that the price when you act on the advice will be more or less the same as the price when they produced the advice. The whole thing is a colossal scam from start to finish.
The fact that he still had a job after his 2008 mistake of insisting that Bear Stearns was fine and a safe place to keep your cash, is astounding. That should've been an unrecoverable mistake, especially with how strongly he was certain.
"Should I be worried about Bear Stearns in terms of liquidity and get my money out of there? No, NO, NO!!!" (Afterwards... 90% loss in the next 6 days.)
His job is to attract viewers. Not to make accurate stock picks. When I watch a comedy show it's because I find it entertaining, not because I actually take advice from comedians.
The comparison to a comedy is a pretty silly one - comedies are pretty explicit about what they are and are pretty clearly not trying to give you financial advice or medical advice or anything like that[0]. Cramer is on a news network and tries to give the appearance of being a financial advice segment, stopping short (likely including the words “this isn’t financial advice” with a little implied wink of).
It’s clear to you and I what Cramer’s deal is, but there are plenty of people out there who take him at face value.
[0] - there’s sometimes product placement or even a little feel-good message about friendship or family, but rarely if ever anything that looks like actionable advice.
Comedians that pretend to do news like Jon Stewart or John Oliver are just as harmful.
Presenting biased views that shape people’s entire views of society can be much more destructive over a lifetime than bad stock picks. Destroyed family connections because people refuse nuance, non-existent careers because “capitalism bad”, etc.
This is nothing more than a money grab to the chat groups that made it popular to note in hindsight that Cramer was wrong.
Picking against Cramer is no more different than picking against a random person with random picks, which is like 50/50 except you will pay some ETF fees to do so but you will at least have fun losing money like in casinos
That's the case if Cramer is just an honest guy making his honest picks completely independently, and nobody with any power would even dream of using his platform to do anything untoward, because everyone with any direct or indirect ability to influence him is just so darned honest that they wouldn't dream of exploiting such a large pool of useful reputation.
I don't know why I feel I should point this out. I'm sure it's completely true. Don't even know why it would cross my mind to wonder. The financial world is so honest and full of integrity that it's obvious that this is true.
You mean, hypothetically speaking, that Cramer would be gasp paid to promote specific stocks? Maybe when they are in a dire situation (or when insiders know it's going to be pretty bad pretty soon now™)? Yes, that would be bad.
It doesn't have to be "paid" in any direct way. Cramer is an ex-Goldman Sachs, ex-hedge fund guy. He just needs to call up one of his old buddies and say "hey...Ima gonna tell the rubes to buy FooCorp tomorrow on the show". His buddies profit from knowing that early, and they do something 'nice' for old Jim down the road, like get him an 'exclusive interview' or something he can profit from. It's a racket.
The SEC prosecutes people for this type of thing. Much safer approach is to let your buddies buy first, then pump one of them. Lot's of plausible deniability. "Hey, every major fund has some XYZ, I just like the stock right now."
Sure they do. But if the quid pro quo exists outside of the finance world (e.g. I tell you what I'm gonna tell the proles, you give me the inside scoop I can monetize on my TV show/podcast/tiktok channel) it's harder for the SEC to bring a case. It's not what they're set up for.
Curious what the actual crime is there, assuming Cramer had no insider information about the company. Basically, how is this say different from Hindenburg research taking a short position then releasing a damaging report? Or me buying a company and then telling others to buy it, too?
You have to disclose that you have a vested interest. And even then you have to avoid transactions for a period of time after to avoid it being a “pump and dump”.
Whilst I tend to agree with your first point, assuming Cramer's picks are actually of random quality there is still one slight difference if lots of dumb money is picking stocks based on what he says on TV. Time the short right and the stock will be slightly overvalued based on everyone else's expectations because of dumb money inflows...
Since Cramer has a large audience, his picks function as a magnet that aligns the beliefs of some subset of that audience. If the effect is large enough, then trading against that effect can be worthwhile. It's exploiting the same alignment effect as companies that buy order flow from retail investor apps. Retail investors typically do not generally buy large amounts of a single stock over time to get the best price. By buying Robinhood's order flow, Citadel can trade against a counterparty whose behavior is generally known.
The theory behind exploiting the gradient created by alignments caused by factors other than fundamental business performance is better than random.
an inexperienced trader may end up losing money on a trade regardless if they picked the "correct" side because they usually have no exit strategy and they will inevitably screw it up.
The most important parametes of the ETF will be what time delay and how long. I guess that's critical for any ETF, but the market almost always blips in Cramer's direction before reversing (and occasionally not reversing).
The inverse Cramer analyses on WSB are some of my favorite posts there (although it's a cesspool today so that's not much praise). But yeah, there are actual data-driven strategies to make money by inversing Cramer.
I’m betting that most people who listen to Cramer aren’t watching his videos the very second the come out, on 2x speed so they can get the tips before they are public knowledge. So effectively he is inciting mob action on stocks, but not in real time.
So if you disagree with him and follow him anyway, you have a sort of moral equivalent of insider information. If you sell a stock in the middle of their buying frenzy at least. If you buy a stock the day after he says sell, you can benefit from the market correction when the rest of the cramerless world can’t figure out why TSM dropped five bucks on Monday for no reason, and decide to buy more.
I get the joke and I do think Cramer is wrong a lot but its kind of mean. Imagine your entire identity is wrapped up in being the stock picker guy and someone comes along and invents an ETF that just counter trades you and it outperforms you by a ton. Thats got to be pretty devastating and lead to some serious self doubt. Probably the end of his career too if the ETF consistently outperforms him. He's a public figure making financial advice so more power to whoever invented the ETF, i just see the other side as well.
Someone gave me one of his books. It has advice like make sure you have disability insurance (loss of work is the #1 financial risk for most people) and max out your tax advantaged accounts in appropriate low cost investments.
The "Mad Money" thing is for money left after you cover all that stuff.
If you're bored and into financial "stuff" look up the returns of the typical ESG sector fund, then compare the return to the "YALL" ETF. I still laugh at the ticker symbol for "YALL". Sometimes you just can't make this stuff up.
The analogy with the inverse cramer fund is pretty obvious as YALL is pretty much a reverse ESG fund "more or less much hand waving here".
he called the market then, very well, he told you when to get out, I watched it. he said I just sold my beach house, get flat. I told my friends to get flat the week before.
The SEC will allow joke and meme ETFs, and triple leverage commodity ETFs, but a normal, non-leveraged Bitcoin ETF? No, we have to protect investors from that.
The SEC's reasoning for not allowing a spot BTC ETF is that you can't trust the markets it trades on and more importantly for them, they can't go and subpoena the trader information from, say Binance, if they think there is market manipulation going on iwth the spot price of BTC.
They can do that with leveraged and meme ETF's so those same reasons don't hold.
This seems to be misrepresenting the "blindfolded monkeys" thing. Assuming that equity prices are an unbiased random walk, a blindfolded monkey will on average do exactly as well as anything else. The reason the professional stock picker is a worse choice is they charge you more for their services, and this is where you lose money on choosing them. It seems that unbiased random walk is a fairly good model of short-term equity returns.
So no, I don't think "do the inverse of a stockpicker" would on average do any better than just following their advice. Additionally, if the fund charges for their service of maintaining that inverse exposure, it will perform worse in end-user returns.
There was an Inverse Galloway Index (although not an actual fund I think) that saw some fat returns when there was a seemingly unlimited money supply, but if you had invested in it a year and a half ago you would be deep in red.
Over a period of a year or two nobody knows anything, possibly even in general. So can't blame Cramer too much. On the other hand there's no reason to listen to him either.
If you want to bet on the inverse of the strategy working, you would want buy puts or short the non-inverse fund, NOT buy the inverse fund .
The reason has to do with the mathematics of inverse fund decay. inverse funds of indexes will decay exponentially long term. It has a quadratic decay factor relative to volatility.
e^(-at) which a is the volatility and t is the time.
This is just an illustration that any stock market "system" contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. This is because if the "system" says "buy", then it must find people willing to sell. If everybody instead rushes to use the "system", then the price of the stock rises to negate the value of the "system".
The only way to create a working system is to keep it a secret, and keep your trading volume low enough so that nobody notices what you're doing.
Bernie Madoff's "system" worked only because he back dated the trades. Oops.
I'm not the biggest Jim Cramer fan but he ran a successful hedge fund and has been in the industry for 20 years.
He is an expert and knows what he's talking about and is pretty knowledgeable about the US cash equities markets.
Part of the inverse Kramer ETF's success is that if you run a hedge fund you can make bank on 20 positions over a year or two.
If you are on TV every night you need a new "winner" 5 times a week, which just isn't possible.
Speaking of ETFs, anyone find themselves temporarily parking money in HISA ETFs?
It's a good way to return close to 5% right now without the time lock in period of a CD.
Theoretically should be very low risk unless a bank collapses, although the amount of money that the ETF fund managers place with each underlying bank savings account is obviously way behind FDIC deposit protection.
I'm still waiting for someone to implement my idea for the "US Legislative Evil Fund." Basically, it just tracks the stock picks of the 25% of the richest US Senators and Congresspeople and their families. For some strange reason, their portfolios seem to do much better than the S&P 500.
May be we should have inverse of all major actively managed funds. Per Buffet theory, this should always outperform market while not having limitations of passive ETFs and much harder to manipulate.
I think you have misunderstood Buffett theory. Most (i.e., more than 50%) of actively managed funds underperform, but in aggregate the amount of underperformance across all funds is roughly equivalent to the management fees they charge. Imagine a bell curve centered around the overall market's returns, but shifted over by a few percent to account for the fees.
An inverse of all major actively managed funds will get you the same average performance before the fees (the same as the overall market's), but it won't dip into those managers' bank accounts and transfer their fees to you. It will charge its own fees. So it will underperform, too.
The management fee for this ETF, for example, is 1.2% per year.
>The premise behind SJIM is theoretically sound and can be boiled down to one observation: "the average stock picker performs horribly ."
No it is not at all theoretically sound. The biggest issue with stock picking is low volatility. This does not solve that. The other issue is that stock pickers don't do better or worse than a random selection of stocks after adjusting for factor tilt. That means stock pickers can't do better than average, but they also can't do worse than average - so the whole premise makes no sense if you actually buy into the idea that stock picking doesn't work.
Another theoretical issue is that UNDER performance doesn't mean NEGATIVE performance. If the market average is returning 10% one year, and a stock-picker returns 6% (maybe even 8% - but with fees eating 2%), then doing the OPPOSITE of the stock picker would be a bad idea. You don't want to short stocks that (on average) are having positive returns ...
>That means stock pickers can't do better than average, but they also can't do worse than average.
Not True. In fact virtually all stock pickers will do better or worse then the average. What you mean to say is the "average" stockpicker can't do better or worse then the average but that is of course a tautology.
What I actually mean is that 99.999% stock pickers can't intentionally do better or worse than average. And the tiny fraction who can are fund directors who are flooded with so much capital that they generate sub-1% alphas (which they eat up with their own fees).
Wouldn't it be possible to do worse? I think there should be enough opportunities to pick up true losers or almost dying companies.
I'm not saying you could extract profit for those situation as there are too many other people trying to do it. But losing money should certainly be possible.
1. You could try to do worse than average, and you'd succeed, but only because of the skewness of individual stock performance. You'd be no better than random chance at picking losers, it'd just be that most stocks are losers.
2. Factor-correction means the strategy of "choosing dying companies" won't work (e.g. in the Fama and French five factor model a dying company would an outlier in terms of high-minus-low, robust-minus-weak, and probably conservative-minus-aggressive).
SARK seems to have outperformed ARK regardless unless I'm reading the wrong graph (which I might be to be fair)
But honestly these meme ETFs aren't meant to be held long term, they're intraday funds. If you read their prospectus, they're charging you a lot to hold it with an expense ratio of 1.06% (compare that to VTSAX at .04%)
https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&t...