Opening Segment #3:
'Level Playing Field?'
Monday, April 20, 2009
 

Jim:     You know where we are… despite today’s brutal sell off… we are still coming out of the depression caused by the totally avoidable failure of Lehman Brothers… it is beginning to look like a brand new cycle… and you have got a great chance to buy tech… anything China related, like the oils and minerals… and the winners in banking… now, it does not mean that everything is honky dory… the situation has definitely gotten much better than the bottom in March… but a lot of things still need to happen to make the world safe once again for you, the individual investor… and it is not safe yet...

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Market Results today:

Dow:  - 289

Nasdaq:  - 64

S&P 500:  - 37

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Monday, April 20, 2009
(Cont'd from above)...

Jim (cont'd):

I pulled up with Dick Grasso, the former boss of The New York Stock Exchange last Friday… who told me that without some real enforcement of important rules… like the end of naked shorting, which allows short sellers to basically issue stock themselves and then knock the share price down with it… and what else does Grasso want, the reinstatement of a real uptick rule… that requires shorts to wait for a buyer to pay up instead of allowing them to blast the stocks down… the market is just not a great place for you… Grasso, as always, is dead right.

So, what would make me feel like things are better… that the playing field for the retail investor, for you, has been leveled… and these are all things that I know because I have traded for so long… we have got to have the uptick rule brought back… and it can’t be the fake one that I hear people talking about… the fake one that only kicks in when the market is down big, it is just a canard… that is a way to placate the public without protecting you at all from the rapacious stealers of your wealth… supporters of this distinctly phony solution better be aware that we are completely and utterly on to them… do they think that we have just fell off a turnip truck here… and as Dick Grasso told me, how can you continue to hurt the regular investors and expect that volumes, real volumes, not just hedge fund tradings and ETF’s will ever come back.

The uptick rule protected us from endless short selling because it forced the shorts to either wait for a stocks price to move higher, before they could bang it down with a short sell… and made it so… everything had to cool off, you couldn’t just crush stocks… they created this rule during the Depression, to prevent a repeat of the Great Crash… but then the SEC under Chris Cox got rid of it in 2007... well let me just tell you… let me ask you… look what happened since then… we need to bring back the uptick rule… the SEC better listen… and by the way, the mutual funds that have all of your money, they better listen too… because they are the only ones that really save us… they have got to speak up.. .it can’t just be me here on Mad Money… right now the quant funds, the guys who just trade off of computers… the hedge funds, the guys who are much richer than you… the exchanges, the guys who need short term volume to make their numbers… and the ETF industries, yeah the one that brought you the bank weapon of mass destruction the SKF… probably cost the taxpayer billions of dollars in bailouts, as it allowed the shorts to sow fear and destroy banks… those interests are all in charge… we are not in charge, you are not in charge… those bad interests… those anti-capitalist interests captured the bureaucracy… and there are enough no nothing professors who have never traded are willing to say that this stuff does not matter… it galls me… I welcome them to spend 5 minutes with me so I can explain the way the world really works… you have to trust me… not them… as someone who has their academic credentials and traded for 20 years, I can tell you that they do indeed know nothing.

Second we need to see the end of naked short selling… where investors sell a stock short without having borrowed it first… they can sell shares that they do not even have… they create stock… that is not how things work in real life… it is unfortunately how things work in the stock market, because the exchanges wanted a lot of stock to be traded… and all of the brokerages want as much volume as they can… and the government does not care anymore about you… how do we stop this… how do we get the government to protect you… well, maybe the companies can help… they should call all of their brokerage houses, because they do a lot of investment banking, and tell them that they will never do a dime of business with them unless they call all of the naked shorting… in other words, that they call in all of the stock that is naked… and they can do that… like the stock that drove down Wells Fargo, and GE, and JP Morgan to levels that are ridiculous.

Right now the only company that I know is actually trying to do this is Sears, my friend Eddie Lambert… he is helping to enforce this rule by really monitoring it… and I think we got a double in that stock while he did it… the government only has to bring one high profile naked shorting case against a hedge fund, and the brokerage house… and that jig is up… one case government.

Alright, third we need indictments… I want kangaroo court, show trials, star chambers, waterboarding galore… you name it… but you can not have it until you indict… now I mention that parade of ridiculous total injustice because the more on blogs who dog me even when I sleep, can now say that Cramer calls for waterboarding of Dick Fall of Lehman, and the whole board of directors at AIG… all I can say is thank you blogs, at least someone is paying attention… I mean where are the AIG indictments… have you seen a perp walk… I mean the only perp walk that you are going to see is on Law & Order Criminal Intent, because I am a team player… Jeff Goldblum, okay, can’t wait… where is the special justice department czar that we have been calling for for white collar crimes… so we can get some runaway grand juries going to look into the collapse of Bear, and Lehman, and Washington, Mutual and Wachovia, and how about all of those mortgage broking frauds… here is a simple question… it is kind of like Watergate… they are selling the stock right, what did they know, and when did they know it… overlaid by when they told you to buy… I will testify in everyone of these cases.

Here is the bottom line…

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The Bottom Line!:      We get honest SEC enforcement… a real return of the real uptick rule… where the shorts have to wait until the customer perhaps pays up a nickel from the last sell… we get enforcement of naked shorting… and a ban of the bogus products that allow hedge fund short sellers to get around the margin rules to destroy banks, the Fed can take care of that too… and we get indictments… glorious indictments… then we can say that it is okay to go back into the water and it is no longer dirty… until then… giving the approaching nationwide bottom in real estate, in the worst hit areas of the country, I would rather buy a house than buy a stock… Mad House Money... The uptick rule, end of naked short-selling & some indictments - that trifecta could level the playing field, until then the housing waters are a more tepid place to shop. We need to bring back the uptick rule… we need to see an end to naked shorting… we need to see indictments.. .yes, and waterboarding… no, just kidding.. but how about we get the playing field level by having a little enforcement… and maybe some time spent in jail for the real bad guys.

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[verbatim recap]

 

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Jim went on after this segment to take questions from callers, and responded with his comments...

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Q:    I am wondering if the re-imposition of the uptick rule which is something that you have been advocating for a while now, may actually have some unforeseen adverse consequences for long investors. For example, couldn’t it have an adverse affect on long ETF’s because of all the hedging and leveraged investment techniques involved? What do you think?

Jim:   
Why do we need the long ETF’s… we did pretty well without them for a long time, the market went up a great deal, a lot of wealth was created… the ETF’s seem to be very much zero summary in it.. they changed everything in the commodities… remember, commodities do not create capital… what creates capital, what creates wealth, are stocks going higher… progress, I am yes, in favor of stocks going higher… it has been my mantra since I started writing about the stock market in 1982... I favor stocks going higher… that is the bias that I have traded with… that is the bias that I have Mad Money on… and as far as I am concerned, those ETF’s do not help the cause.

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Q:    I am a college student, a new investor. I am wondering about the importance of valuation of good will on a balance sheet. What determines these numbers? and what do they tell us?

Jim:   
Well, it was like I was thinking about the good will of buying… let’s say that you bought Dow Jones, for like $5b here… it is a hypothetical, you are a big media conglomerate and you bought a company like Dow Jones for $5b and it is worth a lot less… well, you have got a lot of good will on the balance sheet, so you take that hypothetical situation, and shouldn’t you hypothetical write down the hypothetical good will and take a hypothetical charge and hypothetically wipe out your earnings… yes… but a lot of companies do not like to take the good will charges because it makes them look like they made a mistake when they buy… so we are very tough on good will on Mad Money… we want to see the charges taken, we don’t like earnings… and remember that was totally hypothetically, no company actually bought Dow Jones.

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[verbatim recap]

[end of segment]


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