Sneak Preview: Ride the Business Cycle

Editor's note: This is a special excerpt from Jim Cramer's book, Jim Cramer's Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich. To order your copy and read all the rules, click here.

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In Real Money, I gave you a list of rules that I'd put together to stop myself from making mistakes at my hedge fund. Those rules still apply, but they're not enough. The world has changed in the last two years, and I've learned a lot more about investing.

That's why I have ten new rules, culled from my worst mistakes on Mad Money. These are new rules for a new time. My last set of rules was designed to help ordinary investors deal with the market. Since starting Mad Money, I've realized that "the market" is an unsophisticated, unhelpful way of approaching your investments. That's why both the show and the rules I've created in response to my mistakes on the show aren't about "the market." They're about the big institutions, the hedge funds and the mutual funds, that dominate "the market." It's these institutions that set prices, because they do most of the buying and selling.

As an individual investor, you are dwarfed by these institutions, and you need to know how to respond to them and how to anticipate their moves if you want to make a lot of money. With these rules, you won't feel or be helpless in the face of the behemoths who whip around your stocks.

My ten new rules, coming out of hard-earned lessons on Mad Money, will help you -- the small, individual investor -- beat the big institutions at their own game. That's the secret now: not just looking at "the market" as an abstract force, but looking at the big institutions that make up the market and anticipating their every move. If you listen to my new rules, and if you watch Mad Money, you'll be able to compete with and defeat the big institutions and make yourself a lot of money. Sane investing in an insane world isn't enough anymore: the market's gotten harder. You need to be a madman to make money in this market, and that's why I'm here to help you get inside the head of the craziest man on Wall Street.

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Here are your new rules, the ten lessons I've learned from my most embarrassing moments on Mad Money. Read and learn about the new shape of the market so you can stop crying and start making money with my new disciplines. Most blooper reels just try to make you laugh; with this one, I'm trying to make you money.

1. Resisting the business cycle is futile. It doesn't matter how much you like a stock based on the fundamentals, it doesn't even matter what a stock's "real" relationship to the business cycle is, if you buy a secular growth stock when we're in a cyclical upturn, or a supposedly cyclical stock when we're in an economic slowdown, you will lose. ...