Cramer's 'Mad Money' Recap: Invest Like a Pro

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Editor's note: This recap was last published on Dec. 27, 2011.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- "You can make more money investing for yourself than you would investing in bonds or index funds," Jim Cramer reminded his "Mad Money" viewers Friday, devoting the entire show to helping home gamers become better investors.

Cramer said ordinary people can become great investors, even if the pundits and market "experts" say otherwise.

Cramer's first lesson for investors is that the market isn't always rational and it doesn't always make sense. Sometimes we try to find logic and reason where there is none. "The market does some crazy things," he explained, "and when that happens, you want to take advantage of it."

On days when the markets get pummeled, Cramer said there will be tons of stocks that go down for bad reasons. He said that hedge funds, for example, sometimes need to sell their positions to raise cash to meet margin requirements or redemptions. When this happens, stocks don't move on their individual fundamentals but on the fundamentals of the money management business.

Cramer said the worst thing an investor can do is assume that because a stock trades at a certain level it deserves to be there. "Was it right for oil to trade at $147 a barrel in 2008?" Of course not, he said. With so many hedge funds gravitating toward the futures markets, "hedge funds gone wild" are having a greater impact on how the overall markets react.

The next time everything goes down all at once, Cramer told viewers, don't cook up reasons to justify it, just ask yourself if you might be seeing out-of-control hedge funds taking charge.

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