your faith has come down to money & a tv

Friday, June 02, 2006

The Power of One Man

And I'm not talking about Ben Bernanke either.

Amazingly enough, I'm talking about Jim Cramer and his show Mad Money.

I honestly do not watch his show (mostly because I have no patience for the reiteration of the word "booyah"), however CNBC usually seems to be the only channel on TV with any sort of financial news so I'll switch over to it every once and again to see what they have on.

Well I happened to flip to CNBC this last Tuesday night just in time to see Jim Cramer talking about Netgear (NTGR). Apparently Netgear is developing a Skype telephone and this along with various other reasons (such as the new wireless protocol that recently came out, which will get people to buy more Netgear products) made Netgear a definite recommend from Jim Cramer.

The idea of a Skype phone really intrigued me (I think it will do well, especially with old people), so I looked into Netgear a little bit. "A little bit" for me is not enough research to put my money into something (plus I didn't have any extra funds lying around at the time), so I did not invest in Netgear.

Cramer's power is seen thusly: The next day Netgear jumps 7.5%! No other news had come out about Netgear that day, so I'm left only to assume that enough people watch Mad Money to make the stock price jump up 7.5% in one day. Netgear has been going steadily upwards over the last two days as well, and is now up 13.4% since the close on Tuesday (and since the Cramer recommend). Truly amazing. I don't like the show, the guy's annoying, but people sure do listen to him.

Credit Score Myths

Just read a great article debunking some commonly held credit score myths. It's a good read, and well worth your perusing time (or at least your skimming time):

4 Credit-Scoring Myths