Granville, Cramer and the Second Coming

Similar and Yet Not So Similar

There are many similarities between Joe Granville's 1980s popularity and Jim Cramer's today; there also many dissimilarities.

Granville graduated from the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Ill., a school made famous by the graduation of another entertainer, Orson Welles, and briefly attended Duke University. Cramer graduated from Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., where he was president and editor-in-chief of The Harvard Crimson. Later, he graduated from Harvard Law School.

Granville's first book, A School Boy's Faith, was a travelogue in poetry. Cramer's first job was also in journalism, as a reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. (Before Harvard Law, he helped launch the magazine American Lawyer.)

After enlisting in the Navy, Granville joined E.F. Hutton. He quit six years later to start the Granville Market Letter. After his newspaper gigs, Cramer joined Goldman Sachs. He quit to form his hedge fund, which was known as Cramer Berkowitz.

A Renaissance Man for the New Millennium

The most important dissimilarity between Joe Granville and Jim Cramer is obvious: Granville was a one-trick pony. By contrast, Jim's academic achievements and intellectual content are astonishingly strong. And his professional accomplishments at Goldman Sachs, Cramer Berkowitz and at TheStreet.com are equally remarkable and have allowed him to become financially independent and to pursue his sincere desire to educate investors on his new platform.

Excitability Could Mark a Market Top

In watching the audience and investors' response to Jim "El Capitan" Cramer's live stock recommendations on his "Mad Money" show last night, I couldn't help but think that the instantaneous markups were eerily reminiscent of participants' responses to Granville during his heyday, which leads one to ask whether the excitability around Jimmy's shows, like that of Granville, could mark a market top as unthinking traders mark up his ideas to a fare-thee-well.

'Mad Money' as Microcosm

As I have mentioned repeatedly on Street Insight, my respect for Jim as an investor/trader and as a man knows few bounds. It is the immediate, frantic and unquestioning manner in which investors/traders respond to his ideas (not the ideas themselves) that is reaching silly proportions, and that has me unnerved, causing me to question whether the response to "Mad Money" is a microcosm of a market that has driven fear and doubt away and is ready for a fall.