Hey, I'm Kramer.

Hey, I'm Kramer.

Welcome to MADMoney.

Welcome to Kramer.

I'm just trying to make you a little bit of money.

My job is not just to entertain, but I'm doing some teaching tonight.

So call me at 1-800-743-C-tweet me at Jim Kramer. Let me tell you why I do this show

and why I wrote how to make money in any market. For most of my life, pretty much everybody in

America recognized that picking individual stocks was a fantastic way to get rich.

As long as you did it right, not everybody agreed on the right way to do it.

But practically everyone accepted it was certainly worth doing.

Then the dot-com bubble burst in year 2000, and picking individual stocks suddenly went out of style, at least for regular people.

Suddenly, there was a new conventional wisdom on Wall Street, the conventional wisdom of

index fund supremacy. Almost overnight, legions of experts backed up by an endless parade

of non-investing journalists, came out of the woodwork making a pernicious argument that you

were either too stupid or too imprudent to manage your own money.

They claim that it's more or less impossible to consistently beat the market, so you might

just as well park all of your money in an index fund that mirrors one of the major averages,

like the S&P 500. The more extreme index fund absolutists like to say that no one can

consistently beat the market.

And if anyone looks like they can or say they can, it's pure luck.

That means picking individual stocks is nothing more than gambling, where you have no edge.

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