Jim Cramer Truth Watch

This is kind of old news but if you haven't seen it yet, you need to watch this YouTube of Jim Cramer: "No. No. No. Bear Stearns is fine."

I discussed Cramer almost a year ago in my post James J. Cramer: Mad Money, Indeed. To this day it is one of the most popular posts on this blog.

This is a problem with CNBC (which I'm fortunate enough to not watch), not just Cramer. Market Ticker puts it well in a blog post today:

"We do not have 'financial TV' in this country. We have blatant market manipulation in the guise of 'news' on a daily basis."

If you must watch CNBC, put it on mute, and preferably hang your TV set sideways or upside down so that you can remember to only watch it ironically.

Joe Lewis and Bear Stearns

I haven't seen this mentioned in most of the articles about Joe Lewis continuing to buy shares of Bear Stearns.

Take a look at the Schedule 13D filed by Joe Lewis and his apparently related companies.

Scroll down to item 5. You can see that almost all of the shares were "acquired pursuant to exercise of options by option counterparty."

In other words, those shares got "put" to him, at prices between $90 and $110. Bear closed today at $88.

It's possible that he meant to acquire the shares that way - so that he collects a premium and then buys the shares. But it's also possible that he thought that the stock had bottomed.

Any way you slice it, selling those $110 puts was a losing trade.