저자: JimCramer · 외국인
요약 보기
Cramer는 자신의 초기 종목 선정 경험을 돌아보며, 잘 아는 분야에 투자하는 것, 철저한 리서치, 그리고 규율의 중요성을 강조합니다. 또한 작게 시작하는 것이 현명하다고 말합니다. 라이브 Q&A에서는 20~30년의 장기 투자 기간을 가진 시청자에게 개별 종목보다 S&P 500 또는 총수익(total return) 펀드(뱅가드 방식 등)를 추천하고, 1~2년 목표를 가진 경우에는 콜옵션과 같은 단기 고위험 전략은 추천하지 않겠다고 답합니다.
다듬은 글
We're riding the magical money mystery tour tonight and I'm giving you the life lessons I've learned the hard way through decades of investing. Right now I want to tell you how I got started in individual stock picking. Something you know I love and still believe in even after multiple periods of pain, chaos, and chicanery.
Presumably you believe too or else you wouldn't be watching. 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. When I got started in 1979 there was no such thing as an online account. I had my money with Fidelity, courtesy of my Magellan fund account, so I chose to put my individual stock account there, too.
When I first began, I didn't know where to look for ideas. So I turned to a magazine I liked, Forbes. Now people at Forbes, please don't take this personally, but I read a nifty article about American Agronomics, a terrific orange grower in Florida. Seemed so compelling that I bought 10 shares of it for nine bucks.
Week later, frost hit, wiped out the crop, and my investment was more than cut in half. Like the plot of Creating Places, an all-time great Eddie Murphy movie if you've ever seen it. Well, what can I say? Pretty similar. I was devastated but not defeated. I sold it out, took the capital, and bought seven shares of Bobby Brooks, a clothing outfit I'd heard of, which again Forbes said could be a terrific buy.
Almost immediately the company reported a bad quarter and my money halved again. Fortunately, I had a decent job at a magazine called American Motor, which had just started. I was making 20 Gs and living in a less than swank studio on 44th Street between 1st and 2nd, near the United Nations. The cheap $40 a month rent allowed me to replenish my stock portfolio pretty quickly.
I was on the road quite a bit back then and after a particularly hard night on the town researching a story in Kentucky, I fell in love with the breakfast at Bob Evans Farms. Finding out that it was publicly traded when I went back, I I I visited that huge, fabulous Midtown Manhattan New York Public Library, you know, the ones with the big lines in front of it, and devoured everything I could find about Bob Evans.
They had magazines with articles, microfiche, and four-month-old financials, investment publications with write-ups that allowed me to compare Bob Evans with other companies in the industry, which is what you have to do. I knew I had a good one, so I bought 20 shares. Stock went up immediately, had a good quarter, had a stock split, and I figured out the first good component of investing, know what you own.
What did I know about growing oranges with American Agronomics? I mean, who who knew? Did I know anything about women's fashion? I mean, certainly not me. But a good plate of scrambled eggs and sausage after hard night on the town, well, that served in attractive setting, good service, nice enough growth plan, a big plan to expand in the Midwest, that was for me.
Next up, SPS Technologies. That's the old Standard Pressed Steel, an outfit from my old hometown that made fasteners, screws for airplanes, something that Howmet now dominates. Why SPS? Because a buddy of mine from high school catching up with me told me that they were hiring like mad if I was looking for a job, paying good money.
Well, I already had a job, but back to the library for more research. Solid company, no debt, but nothing in print about its hiring push. Wow, ripe for a trade. SPS doubled not long after and I caught the bug for good. 23 years later it would be acquired by Precision Castparts, the preeminent supplier to aircraft builders around the globe, before PCP went on to sell itself to Berkshire Hathaway in 2016.
Good bloodlines. So now I'm figuring it out. The best investment ideas come from what you know, melded with information gleaned from public sources, even if there is late and is hard to access as taking a surreptitious 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, though.
A friend from home was lucky to call about jobs available at SPS Technologies, a hearty breakfast at Bob Evans Farms. I mean, I figured I'd be more rigorous approach, right? Then it hit me. Look around at work, stupid. At the time I was covering mergers and acquisitions, uh but looking at the lawyers who do the deals, profiling some, following the deals they were on.
It seemed like every other deal was in the oil patch. One after another, small to mid-size oil companies were being acquired and all I was doing was standing around writing about them. So I went back to the library, took out some editions of a thing called Value Line, stock research magazine, and checked out the pages devoted to oil companies.
Then I cross-referenced them with other research to find out which ones could be acquired without problems, either because they were publicly traded without a family owning them or because they seemed to be fit the size, the parameters of so many other deals. So I settled on this thing called Natomas, an oil company with a real onshore in Indonesia.
Oh, I didn't have long to wait. Kerr-McGee struck, bought them, almost doubled my money. Another lesson learned, when buying takeovers, buy companies that would do well on their own. Natomas was, but it was under managed, which was the the consensus I found by reading the articles about the oil enterprise.
That meant another oil company with bigger scale could do more with Natomas, which was cheaper than it should be if it simply got rid of the existing management. As much as I had hit some winners, though, I was distraught that I'd given up the ghost in those first few trades. At the time I'd been hanging around the track on weekends, let's say Aqueduct, you bet, and I learned how to handicap by reading the books of Andy Beyer, the legendary horse horse racing writer.
He is something, okay? Beyer's Picking Winners is among the best investing books ever written, even as it's betting on the ponies. It teaches discipline, how to identify the best thoroughbreds to bet on, how to find the best long shots, going to the out-of-the-way tracks where information was less well known, not betting willy-nilly on every horse in each race.
Find the ones where the payoff was more sure and bet big. Cut your losses if you're having a bad run. Every one of these lessons could be applied to the stock market, right? I mean, you can take a huge swing when you know what you're doing, particularly when others don't on a less well known stock, out-of-the-way track.
Don't just gamble on stocks for the excitement of it. That is foolish. 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 back to law school. The good news? I'd saved enough money to pay for my first YEAR ON THE STOCK MARKET.
AS I never would have had enough money to cover the cost of it if I just kept my money in a savings account. So here's the bottom line. You want to get started, go small. Invest what you know. Research intensely. Just research, research, research. Back then I got old data from public library. Now it's as simple as a keystroke and the information is free, including up-to-the-minute financials, analyst presentations, broker research, and of course the conference calls that I tell you are a must if you want to actually know what you're doing.
Simple? No. Lucrative? You bet it is. Let's go to Michael in California. What's up, Michael? Yes, Jim. First of all, thanks for taking my call. Of course. I'll try and make this as quick as possible as I I know you got a lot of people to help here. Um this has to concern my two children. Uh I inherited recently a quite a deal of money, not a million dollars, but it's a substantial amount.
And um I'm looking at a 20-to-30-year time frame here. I've been investing uh for them since the day they were born. Uh they're doing all right, but I want them to leave them some good good money. I'm thinking on the lines of uh uh Berkshire B and uh now this is putting all this money uh Berkshire B and ETF of Vanguard ETF or some of that somewhere along those lines.
What what what's your opinion? okay. I think that S&P 500 fund and the total return funds are both really good for that kind of situation. Vanguard's total return. The one thing I would caution is as much as I like Warren Buffett, uh I just think that you have to be you have to have a kind of a basket if you do one stock, but if you do the ones I just mentioned, you don't need a basket and you don't have to keep track of them every minute.
By the way, if they're young enough, maybe you give them something that they actually want to spend some time learning about and that could be good, too, to keep them invested and interested in their money. But thank you for those kind questions uh and let's go to uh Loyal in Arkansas. Loyal. Yes, sir.
How are you doing, Mr. Cramer? I'm doing well, Loyal. How about you? I'm doing all right. I want to know, getting back to the market with 11K, what's the best way to have a long-term uh a long-term goal but get a short-term return within a a year or two on your investment? Well, you know, that's it it's too risky, frankly.
I I I at one time or another, I think it in my earlier years, I would have suggested call options and then also some longer-term stocks and mutual funds, but these days I'm just against the short-term stuff. I can't deliver and I don't want to encourage trading. But thank you so much. I wish I could do better for you, but it's just not my thing.
Trading things not my thing. Anyway, if you want to get started in stocks, go small. Invest in what you know and research intensely. The process may not be simple, but boy, it can be lucrative. All right, much more Mad Plus, I'm taking your investing questions with my investing club colleague, Jeff Marks. So stay with C C.
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