Cramer on the Tools of His Trade

People keep e-mailing me about what tools I use, what software I like, what sites I reference. I've got some bad news for all of you who think these things are important: the only tools I find valuable are the ones I buy at Home Depot.

Investing is a game of psychology and information. Everything else is garbage. For example, I keep hearing about all of the great "tools" at the Microsoft Investor site, or whatever it is called, and I have to laugh. Tools don't make you nothing. Nor can I learn about Wall Street from "journalists" based in Seattle, (Jubak excluded) where no big investment hitters are located. What do they do there, interview each other? Read a bunch of wires and pontificate off them? Investor probably costs more to put out than TSC anyway. (Ballmer get a grip, you know these things.)

But if I heard that site, or any of its brethren, the ones I derisively call "Brief Quote Broad Fool," actually offered information, tradeable real time information, I would be all over them like a cheap suit. Tools are for amateurs. They tend to get you in when everyone else is getting you in and get you out when everyone else is piling for the exits. That's a recipe for performance not outperformance. Information, on the other hand, is currency, particularly informed information about what companies and people are doing and saying.

On my desk I have a Bloomberg, an ILX machine, a Shark and a Bridge, and a PC with thestreet.com's home page flashing. I have all of these machines so I can read the Reuters, Dow Jones and Bloomberg and TSC news, trade stocks and bonds and have, if I need it, a graphic presentation of a stock I am buying. I do no technical work. I have a chart book at my desk which I look at in a desultory fashion. I don't even have those other Internet sites bookmarked. Nor does any other investing professional because they break no stories and contain no information that isn't available via CNBC (which I have on in the background) or the other wires, particularly Reuters, which it seems is the fundament of all the other sites anyway.

I will go into why I don't care about the technicals at length in some article in the future, but I wanted to nip all of this talk about TradeStation and Techno-Trak or whatever people keep asking me if I use, because my investing is based on my own wits suffused with the most current news and psychological input available. How do I figure the latter? Again, no program, just my gut I am afraid. But I do let you, the TSC members, in on my thinking as close to when I come up with my view.

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