Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 7/10/26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Say you always wanted to have a backyard oasis. Here's the thing, if you get smart with your money, you can do things like that.
With Empower, you can start making the most out of your money, so you can go out and live a little. Isn't that why we work so hard? To have some fun with our money? Like treating yourself to something special, or spontaneously doing something extra for a loved one. So use Empower and get good at money, so you can be a little bad. Join their 20 million customers today at empower.com, not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how.
Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:00)
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.

**Jim Cramer** (1:17)
Hey, I'm Cramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Cramer America. I'll be with my friends. I'm just trying to make 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-CBC. Tweet me at Jim Cramer.
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 that it was certainly worth doing. Then the.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 are 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. 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. I like that. After the.com bust and then the financial crisis, that argument became pretty darn compelling. This is the ideology, though, that is absolutist. And for that, I think it's wrong. I've been fighting since Mad Money first went on the air. Why? Because as I explained how to make money in any market, it doesn't work. If you're willing to do the homework, and it's never been easier to learn about the companies behind your stocks, individual stocks can change your life. They can make you rich in a way that no index fund ever could.
And it happens. I have seen it endlessly with my own eyes. And hey, it's absolutely possible to beat the averages. Take the SB 500, the benchmark of all benchmarks. There are 500 stocks in the S&P. Most of them are not all that good. In fact, at any given moment, I don't think there are 500 good stocks in the entire market. So, when you buy an S&P 500 index fund like the SPY, the SPY, you're buying the good with the bad. Which brings me to the unvarnished truth. You will most likely not get rich just by owning index funds. That's why I still recommend putting 50% of your savings in an index fund. I'm a believer. But that's purely as a hedge against the mistakes that do inevitably occur when you manage your own money. Picking stocks is higher risk than owning an index fund. So, you need the index half as backup. But at the end of the day, an S&P 500 index fund is merely an amalgamation of a few good stocks with a lot of mediocre ones and plenty of flat out bad ones. The stocks of fresh-faced wonders regularly get added to the index, but they're still outweighed by everything else.