Putting Cramer's Mad Money Picks to the Fire

There's been a lot of back and forth about the Barron's piece that came out about Jim Cramer over the weekend, which was critical of his picks on CNBC's Mad Money TV show.

It occurred to me when I read the piece that nobody has actually done a test of Mad Money's results using the buying time frame that Jim describes over and over again on the show and in his book, "Mad Money."

So I decided to break out the software, load up the trades, and do the test. Furthermore, using the same analysis, I also break down Barron's picks from its newspaper.

But first, note this: I'm completely biased. I've written for TheStreet.com for almost five years and recently Stockpickr.com was acquired by TheStreet.com, making me a shareholder here. Furthermore, I appear regularly on CNBC (if you blink you might miss me, but trust me, I'm there).

But one thing that's not biased is the straightforward numbers. I wanted to do an apples to apples test with Barron's data. Since Barron's tested from Jan. 1 to July 31, that's what I did. I asked Jim Cramer's Mad Money team to give me all his recommendations during that period, which they did. There were 445 recommendations that he made in the main segments of the show (I count a "main segment" as basically any segment where he spends more than 30 seconds on a stock).

1. Do Cramer's picks make money?
2. Does Cramer outperform the market?

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