Friday, May 2, 2008

Warren Buffett and Jim Cramer: Claws and Effect

Bill Barker at The Motley Fool must be a fan of Low I.Q. Analysis (LIQA). I am and since I've adopted the approach I've never outsmarted myself.
From Motley Fool:

Along with being the world's greatest living investor, Warren Buffett is an outstanding writer, a generous educator, and a reliable wit. His annual letters to shareholders, replete with investing insights both timely and timeless, nearly always include a number of well-delivered jokes.

In one letter, he wrote:

We show below our common stock investments. With two exceptions, those that had a market value of more than $700 million at the end of 2006 are itemized. We don't itemize the two securities referred to, which have a market value of $1.9 billion, because we continue to buy them. I could, of course, tell you their names. But then I would have to kill you....

...Attention and asset prices
In that regard, a fascinating study has recently been released. It's titled "Attention and Asset Prices: The Case of Mad Money," and it examines the effects of sudden attention on stock prices, both large-cap and small-cap. The abstract for the report pretty much sums up the findings of the study:

We document market inefficiency in the days following the buy recommendations of Jim Cramer, host of the popular CNBC show Mad Money. The average overnight return following a first-time recommendation by Cramer is 2.86% for our entire sample and 6.76% for the smallest quartile, but these gains disappear (reverse) within several trading days. We also find that trading volume and short sales volume are all significantly higher than normal on the day following Cramer's recommendations....MORE