My mission is simple, to make you money.

I'm here to level the playing field for all investors.

There's always a home market somewhere, and I promise to help you find it.

Mad Money starts now.

Hey, I'm Kramer.

Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Kramer, America. Other than my friends,

I'm just trying to make you a little bit of money. My job is not just entertained, but I'm doing

some teaching tonight. So call me at 1-800743 CBC. Cweet 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.

A 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 as they can, it's pure luck.

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

So why not settle for an index fund that can consistently give you 8 to 10% annual return?

Sure, you won't get rich, but you'll steadily make money over time.

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