Action Alerts PLUS

About

Jim Cramer

Action Alerts PLUS is a trading alert service started by Jim Cramer in 2001 to immediately alert subscribers via email and the Web to trades he sees and educate them about trading and investing. Cramer has deposited his own money into Action Alerts PLUS, and the portfolio is currently worth over $2 million. In March 2005, Cramer irrevocably conveyed the portfolio to a trust, with all realized profits going to charity. He has retained full investment discretion over all securities contained in the trust.

Action Alerts PLUS is unique among other email trading alert services in the trading advantage subscribers have over the service's own trader; Cramer can't make a trade until after the trading Alert has been emailed to subscribers, giving them the opportunity to trade before he can. Cramer also will tell subscribers about trades that he would like to make for the portfolio but can't because of his trading restrictions.

Cramer prefers to hold 25 stocks in the portfolio at a time, no more, but sometimes fewer. He chooses stocks for Action Alerts PLUS that he expects to hold for six to 12 months. He does not practice a "buy and hold" market strategy, but aims to teach subscribers his approach of trading around a core holding as market opportunities arise. To learn more about how to use Action Alerts PLUS, visit the Getting Started page.

ABOUT JIM CRAMER

You may know Jim Cramer from television, radio, his books or the Net, but you may not know that he's one of the most successful hedge fund managers in Wall Street history. That's why Cramer has so much to say about the markets: because he has so much experience with them.

For 14 years, Cramer managed money for 38 of the wealthiest families in the world through the hedge fund he founded, Cramer Berkowitz. In his fast-paced autobiography, Confessions of a Street Addict, he details some of the best and worst moments of those long years battling the market, and how he managed to quit while he was ahead. How far ahead? By a compounded 24% after all fees — substantially in excess of the market during that same time. Cramer has seen it all, from the crash of Long Term Capital to the New New Thing, from the deadening bear market of the 1970s to the irrational exuberance of the dawn of the Internet era.

He started even earlier, in 1964: Cramer has been following stocks since he was nine years old, growing up outside Philadelphia. That early love has competed all his life with the desire to write, a passion that propelled him through Harvard College and a turn as president of The Harvard Crimson. But it wasn't until his experiences as a journeyman general assignment reporter, first for the Tallahassee Democrat and then the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, that he realized he wanted to get rich. Really rich. Journalism had helped him become a member of the working homeless — yes, he really slept in his Ford Fairmont for nine months — and Cramer knew there had to be a better way. Broke and in poor health, he made his way back East to New York, where he helped found American Lawyer magazine. There, he tired of writing about wealthy lawyers and decided to become one.

Cramer started seriously trading in order to parlay his paychecks into enough tuition to attend Harvard Law School, where attending class quickly took a backseat to more trading. He was so excited about the prospects for the 1982 market that Cramer sent family and friends a homegrown stock newsletter and left stock tips on his answering machine. Those tips caught the attention of Marty Peretz, who refused to let Cramer return to class unless he agreed to run $500,000 — his first experience managing money. One week later, Cramer had his first lesson in taking a loss. A few weeks later, he had learned how to make back the loss and then some.

The thrill of the market was more alluring than any law career Cramer could imagine. After graduating law school and passing the New York State bar in 1984, Cramer chose to forego a career in law for a sales position at Goldman Sachs. His dogged persistence had won him a coveted summer internship that fired his love for trading into a full-blown addiction. In the years he spent at Goldman, Cramer learned how the business of brokerage houses worked from the inside. But the business of attracting clients was — and in many places, still is — more important than raw performance, and Cramer wanted to trade even more. He started 1987 at the helm of his own hedge fund, Cramer Partners. And that was when he really began to learn how to trade.

Now, James J. Cramer is a markets commentator for CNBC and TheStreet.com's RealMoney, and host of CNBC's Mad Money. He is the author of Confessions of a Street Addict, You Got Screwed, Jim Cramer's Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World, Jim Cramer's Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich and Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer), as well as a featured columnist for New York Magazine. He's also a frequent guest on the Today show and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and an in-demand public speaker. All that is in addition to running a $4 million charitable trust of his own money in order to teach the public, Action Alerts PLUS.

While working at his hedge fund, Cramer helped start Smart Money for Dow Jones, and in 1996, he founded TheStreet.com, the online destination for financial opinion and analysis. In 2000, he retired from active money management to embrace media full-time, including radio and television.