Street Smartypants COMPANY TheStreet.com, Co-Founder and Columnist NET WORTH $58 million AGE 44 E-MAILjjc@thestreet.com BIO With a perfect eye for brand positioning, the hyperactive, know-it-all,
anything-for-a-trade Jim Cramer has come to personify the tech-fueled bull market
he promotes. His "trading turret" reports arm do-it-yourself Web investors going
up against Wall Street pros. While strict editorial rules keep him away from the
newsies, Cramer's voice still dominates TheStreet.com even as the site has grown
from a one-man soapbox into a serious online-news organization. Fittingly,
TheStreet.com went public earlier this year, seeing its shares first inflate to
unearthly heights, then fall back to earth--just the kind of market saga Cramer
likes to chronicle (see "How It Feels to Lose $150 Million," Time, Aug. 16).
By day, Cramer works as a professional hedge-fund manager. His amateur
counterpart is "Tokyo" Joe Park, bottom, the best known of the bulletin-board
stock gurus and one of the country's most influential stock pickers. Tokyo Joe
built his investing reputation post by boastful post on the rough-and-tumble
public discussions of the Silicon Investor (www.siliconinvestor.com), and he has
more than 1,000 investors paying $100 a month to read his online tipsheet,
Societe Anonyme. Cramer's and Park's pronouncements have been known to move
markets--a power formerly reserved for Wall Street analysts and venerable sources
like the Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column.
FORWARD TILT Cramer's bully pulpit will carry him far--even if TheStreet.com's
stock doesn't recover. But new leaders like Park make it uncertain that the
market mob will listen to any one voice for long.
