He sweats. He screeches. He picks stocks. And Jim Cramer, CNBC's newest star, may just be making investing fun again.
Lou Dobbs he ain’t.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer rants. He raves. He paces around a TV set that’s been made to look like a radio studio. He sweats profusely. He rolls up his sleeves in bunches so tight they look like a pair of tourniquets. He spits occasionally. He screeches constantly. He takes phone calls from viewers watching him on his CNBC show, Mad Money, urging them to buy stocks he likes and “Sell! Sell! Sell!” those he hates. He shouts questions to those cal­lers, such as, “What are you, out of your mind?” And he fires off stream-of-­consciousness statements like, “I’m not afraid of the stock ­market” and “Not all dogs have fleas.” He’s also managed to appropriate ESPN anchor Stuart Scott’s catchphrase “Booyah!” and make it his own.

So, sure, maybe CNN’s Lou Dobbs has everything you’d want in a typical business newscaster — he has an excellent grasp of financial subject matter, a commanding onscreen presence, and he looks mighty fine in a pin-striped suit. But you’re never going to compare Dobbs to Dick Vitale, the high-octane goofball who is ESPN’s top college-basketball analyst. In fact, high-octane and goofball are not terms that typically come to mind when describing business journalists. But Jim Cramer, as noted, is not typical. He is, however, a goofball. And Cramer’s bald head, manic on-screen presence, and penchant for shouting with enthusiasm about the ups and downs of the stock market make him stunningly Vitale-esque.

Mad Money isn’t typical of business-news programs, either. In fact, the show is so unusual, it almost doesn’t even qualify as a ­financial-news program. Mad Money moves so fast at times — during his “lightning round” segment, Cramer may run through three dozen stocks in just a few minutes, urging viewers to buy or sell, with little explanation as to why — it makes you wonder whether CNBC really expects viewers to glean anything useful from Cramer’s manic oscillation, or whether the show is intended purely as wacky entertainment.
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Both, says Cramer, a 50-year-old former hedge fund manager who also cofounded TheStreet.com. “There is a philosophy to the orchestrated chaos of the show,” Cramer says, in his distinct, suburban Philadelphia accent. “People need to know more about the stock market. So I say, ‘Let me help you. Let me inform you and entertain you, and I think you’ll make better investments.’ ”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s just nuts. Either way, Jim Cramer is doing something else that’s unique among today’s business TV offerings — he’s making investing seem fun again. That’s not an easy task in this market. Investors’ ears are still ringing from the bursting of the 1990s tech bubble. Plus, a parade of corporate scandals has left many individual investors unwilling to trust corporate America. Maybe that’s why the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been flat for almost a year and why trading volume isn’t growing as exponentially as it was just a few years ago.

“We may be in one of those moments where people dislike stocks too much,” Cramer says from his Wall Street office, perched just above the New York Stock Exchange building. “The scandals were so numbing. People think the market is now an insider’s game.” He suddenly pounds the table in front of him, and shouts, “It’s not, and I can tell them it’s not. There is a lack of enthusiasm right now, but I’m going against it.”

The cuff links are a surprise. On camera, Cramer is wrinkled and rumpled. Always. His hair — what’s left of it, anyway — is unkempt. And he never, ever wears a jacket. So, when he meets me one morning, shortly after the opening bell has rung on Wall Street, I’m surprised to find him wearing what looks like an expensive, purple, French cuff shirt with gold-and-onyx cuff links. I’m also surprised to see that Cramer is well groomed and pressed. He won’t stay that way. About six hours after our interview, Cramer will film Mad Money — the show tapes just about an hour before it airs — and by then he’ll look like he’s spent the day tumbling in a clothes dryer. 
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It’s enough to make one wonder just how calculated Cramer’s over-the-top, on-camera persona is. Mad Money’s producer, Susan Krakower, says that Cramer is equal parts stock savant and showman. “Jim has more stocks in his brain than anyone I’ve ever met,” she says. “He also has great timing. The guy is a performer at heart.”

When I ask Cramer whether he’s performing more than just being himself on Mad Money, he gets surprisingly quiet and thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, I’m not always that way. On Saturday mornings, I like to garden. On Sundays I want to go fishing. But my wife tells me that there’s a certain aspect of my personality that’s always ‘on.’ I think that comes out on camera.”

Suddenly, Cramer turns up the volume again. He does that — speaks normally one minute and starts SHOUTING the next. “I love the fans,” he says. “I love the interaction with the audience and the excitement. And what you see on the show is how I was at the hedge fund. I had no chair there. I’d just stand in front of my screens and scream all day long. My partner, Jeff Berkowitz, would come in and say, ‘You’ve gotta shut up, man.’”

That’s about the same way Nicholas Maier,­ a former hedge fund employee, felt about Cramer. He wrote a book, Trading with the Enemy: Seduction and Betrayal on Jim Cramer’s Wall Street, that detailed Cramer’s crazy corporate behavior and obsession with the stock market. Maier says that on their first meeting, Cramer pointed to his stock-trading terminals and declared, “This is my life. All I think about is the stock market, the stock market, and then I think about the stock market.”
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All that thinking benefited Cramer Berkowitz’s 70 clients, who entrusted the pair with about $400 million. Most of them didn’t see how Cramer went about investing their money. He’d spend 12 hours a day ranting, raving, sweating, and doing virtually everything else that he’s now channeling on Mad Money. Almost everything.

“I haven’t thrown any phones on TV yet,” Cramer says. No desks, either. He once flipped his desk at the hedge fund when his computer screen froze. “Everything shattered — computers, screens, everything. But I’m more in control of my temper now.”

It wouldn’t really matter, though, if his temper wasn’t in check, because the desk on the Mad Money set is bolted down. On it sits a high-tech assortment of computer screens and a sound board that Cramer uses to punch up various effects during the show.

If he’s talking about a stock that’s doing well, he might hit the button that makes cash registers cha-ching. A bad stock could elicit the sound of growling bears. Watch for the whole hour, and you’ll get the full set of sounds — snorting bulls, bowling pins falling, a truck backing up, a hallelujah chorus, Cramer’s voice yelling, “Sell! Sell! Sell!”

Cramer can relate to the sell feeling. He insists that his hedge fund outperformed the market during the fund’s 14-year run, from 1987 to 2001. But even during the good times, Cramer made plenty of bad buys. And then there was that one year — 1998 — when the fund went up only two percent.

“I’d get so angry at the hedge fund when I got things wrong,” Cramer says. “I developed this real sense of worthlessness then. I was too unforgiving of myself.”

That’s one of the reasons why, in 2001, Cramer quit the fund to go full-time into media. It seemed like a logical step, considering he had actually started out as a journalist and had continued writing and working­ in media, even during his years on Wall Street. Cramer, who was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Springfield, just outside of Philadelphia, graduated from Harvard in 1977. Fresh out of school, he went to work briefly for Congressional Quarterly as the key operator — mostly just putting stories into type — and then was hired as a sportswriter for the Tallahassee Democrat. Eventually, he ended up on the homicide beat, thanks, in part, to a fluke of location. 
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“I had an apartment that was next door to the sorority house where Ted Bundy killed those girls,” Cramer says. “So I was the first reporter on the scene, and I ended up writing about it.”

He continued covering homicides for several years, both in Florida and later in California, at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. But, after a thief took everything out of his apartment one day — including his bed, leaving Cramer to spend four months sleeping in the back of his Ford Fairmont — he decided to give up reporting and go back to Harvard for a law degree.

After graduation, he landed in Goldman Sachs’s sales-and-trading department, and he worked his way up the company ladder until 1987, when he decided to venture out with his own hedge fund. Even then, though, the media still beckoned. He assisted Dow Jones during the launch of Smart Money and became a regular columnist to the magazine for several years. He also helped found American Lawyer, and, today, in addition to the daily column he writes for TheStreet.com, Cramer also contributes a weekly column­ to New York magazine. He’s the host of his own daily radio show, too, and has written three best-selling business books. Add to that his constant presence on CNBC well before Mad Money premiered, and it’s easy to see why Fortune once said that “everyone who trades stocks knows Cramer. In fact, no one who follows the market — traders, investors, business-magazine readers — can escape him. He’s everywhere.”

But Cramer wasn’t always happy with every place he ended up. Take Kudlow & Cramer, for instance. That show aired for four years on CNBC, but its focus on the intersection of business and politics, and its lineup of politico guests, didn’t mesh with Cramer’s totally outer limits, nut-bar behavior. In fact, cohost Larry Kudlow, an economist who is as buttoned-up as they come, was so different from Cramer, you wondered if CNBC put them together only for the sake of alliteration. “Kudlow & Cramer was not me,” Cramer says. “On that show, I had to suppress and contain, and my natural tendency is to not suppress and contain. Plus, it was about politics, and anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m scornful of politics. I don’t get the anger.”

Anger. It’s funny, because Cramer gets a lot of anger directed his way these days. From Internet bloggers to TV critics to investor advocates, a lot of people don’t seem to care much for Jim Cramer.

John Markese, president of the American Association of Individual Investors, has called Cramer “embarrassing” and even dubbed him “the financial Jerry Springer.” Elsewhere, Cramer’s stock-picking record has been challenged. The New York Post came up with its own nickname for Cramer — “the 46 Percent Kid” — after it tracked the three-month performance of 183 stocks that Cramer talked about in just one week of shows last spring. The Post found that of Cramer’s 98 buy or sell recommendations, 54 percent actually went the opposite direction of where Cramer suggested they would. 
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Cramer defends his record, pointing out that his show rewards regular viewers — he will sometimes reverse his own picks and he will occasionally chastise himself when he’s wrong. He’s also more than willing to chastise those who challenge him. “The people who want to say that I’m just a cheerleader for stocks, well, my reaction to them is, if that’s all I am — to be blunt about it — then how did I get so rich? The reason I like a stock is because I think it is going higher, not because I’m looking for something to say. And the corollary is true, too. If I’m wrong all the time, then why would you watch me? There’s no gun attached to any TV set in this country.”

Well, there certainly aren’t 180,000 guns attached to TVs nationwide. That’s about the number of households tuned in to Cramer’s show on any given night. For CNBC, Mad Money’s ratings are crazy good. The show is drawing about 80 percent more viewers than watched a string of failures that preceded it in the six p.m. slot. So many people are watching, in fact, that traders are seeing volume spikes the day after Cramer mentions a stock on the air.

Still, let’s not call Cramer a juggernaut yet. Even with 180,000 households, his viewership is tiny in comparison to, say, The O’Reilly Factor, which draws more than 2.4 million households a night. Then again, Cramer is getting known enough that people are stopping him in the grocery store. “I go to buy some fish, and the guy behind the counter says, ‘Booyah, Jim!’ It’s crazy.”

Those are the kinds of people Cramer loves. Even though his blazingly fast delivery makes it almost impossible to hear every stock he mentions on a given show, much less remember them, he’s convinced that he’s connecting with and genuinely helping average investors, the “non-Wall Streeters” as he calls them.

On the day I visited Cramer, the market had the kind of day that scares individual investors away. Stocks tanked. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 166 points. That night, Cramer told viewers off the top that he felt their pain. The first call came from a dejected Lauren in New Jersey, to whom Cramer acted like a sort of financial Dr. Phil. “Talk to me,” he said. “We shake our heads, we moan, we feel bad momentarily. And then we get clearheaded and we figure out how to take a situation that is obviously not good and [make it better].”

That touchy-feely stuff didn’t last. Eventually, Cramer got back to being, well, a goofball. When another sad caller asked, “Is today still booyah, Jim?” Cramer replied, “Hey, it’s still booyah — even down 166. That doesn’t change the booyah factor.”

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"the people who want to say that i'm just a cheerleader for stocks, well, if that's all i am, then how did i get so rich?"