Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 6/23/26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
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**Jim Cramer** (0:41)
My mission is simple, to make you money. I'm here to level the playing field for all investors. There's always a bull market somewhere, and I promise to help you find it. Mad Money starts now.
Hey, I'm Cramer.

**Jim Cramer** (0:58)
Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Cramerica. I'm going to make friends. I'm just trying to make you some money. My job is not just to entertain, but to educate and teach you. So call me at 1-800-743-CNBC, or tweet me at Jim Cramer.
Whenever you're listening to anyone's investing advice, you need to consider the source. And ideally, you want to know where that person is coming from. That's why tonight I'm going to tell you exactly who I am, and how I got here. No, not the standard introduction. I'm Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, co-host of Squawk of the Street, chief of the CNBC Investing Club. What I want to do tonight, in an extremely special show by even by-walking standards, is trace the arc that brought me to Mad Money. Not for some autobiographical ego trip, but to give you some money making lessons from the phases of my various careers. And explain, of course, how you can pop the phone. Remember, in the end, this is Cramer Erica, and everything we do here is about trying to help you make money. In short, I'm giving you the Invest in Cramer guidebook, and I'm gonna call that the skinny on how I learned to be a good investor and how I continue to learn every day so I can help you become better than I ever, I want you to be better than I ever want to be. By the way, that's our mission in the investing club, too. Let's start real early. My love of stocks didn't begin after law school or college or even high school. No, my love for stocks started back in fourth grade. That's for fourth grade. You see, my dad would bring home the old Philadelphia Bulletin. Boy, that brings, about a long time ago that was. At that point, the Philadelphia Bulletin was one of the largest newspapers in the country.
He'd have it when he came back from work every night and give it to me. I wanted the comics and the sports. I was a ridiculous Phillies fan back then. I still am. It's a lifelong affection, I guess, although I have pivoted hard toward the Eagles.
I was also a curious kid. Curiosity's always been both a blessing and a curse for me. Not unlike the proverbial cat that's always probing, looking, and occasionally jumping on some hot stoves. Anyway, there was always this solid chunk of the paper that seemed impenetrable to me. The business section. It was impenetrable because it had these giant lists and names of an agate type that seemed to go on forever. There were the other tables, different from the batting averages tables and box scores I scrutinized as regularity. When I read them from left to right, they made no sense to me whatsoever. Open range closed?
What's open? What range? What closed? What were these strange things?

**Lindsay** (3:09)
Why do they matter?

**Jim Cramer** (3:10)
I asked my dad, who I knew dabbled in the stock market, because occasionally I hear him get mad when he heard prices that were mentioned on the radio. And particularly, he always seemed to get angry when I heard something called national video and how it went out. I don't know what video did other than go out and why it went out. I don't know if Pop did either, though. But I know it made him furious. I wanted to know why.
So he sat me down one day and explained that each of those lines represented the performance of a stock at a company on a different day. The open was where the stock opened in the morning, the range was how low and high it traded during the day, and the close was what it was worth at the end of the day.