How do we find hot stocks without getting burned? How do we fatten our portfolios and stay financially healthy? Former hedge-fund manager and longtime Wall Street commentator Jim Cramer explains how to invest wisely in chaotic times, and he does so in plain English in a style that is as much fun as investing is -- or should be, when it's done right.

For starters, Cramer recommends devoting a portion of your assets to speculation. Everyone wants to find the big winners that can bring outsized gains, and Cramer explains how to allocate your portfolio so that you can afford to take this kind of risk wisely. He explains why "buy and hold" is a losing philosophy: For Cramer, it's "buy and homework." If you can't spend an hour a week researching each of your stocks, then you should hand off your portfolio to a mutual fund -- and Cramer identifies the very few mutual funds that he'd recommend.

Cramer reveals his Ten Commandments of Trading (Commandment #5: Tips are for waiters). He explains why he's not afraid to compare investing to gambling (and tells you which book on gambling you should read to become a better investor). He discloses his Twenty-Five Rules of Investing (Rule #4: Look for broken stocks, not broken companies).

Cramer shows how to compare stock prices in a way that you can understand, how to spot market tops and bottoms, how to know when to sell, how to rotate among cyclical stocks to catch the big moves, and much more. Jim Cramer's Real Money is filled with insider advice that really works, information that Cramer himself used to make millions during his fourteen-year career on Wall Street.

Written in Cramer's distinctive turbocharged style, this is every investor's guide to what you really must know to make big money in the stock market.

Browse Inside: Jim Cramer's Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World

By James J. Cramer
Simon & Schuster, January 2009
Trade Paperback, 320 pages
ISBN-10: 0743224906
ISBN-13: 9780743224901

THE HOST OF CNBC'S MAD MONEY READS HIS BLOCKBUSTER BESTSELLER!

Delivered in his distinctive turbo-charged style, Jim Cramer's Real Money is every investor's guide to what you really must know to make big money in the stock market. The best-known source of investment advice in America today, Jim Cramer explains how to invest wisely in chaotic times, and he does so in a way that is as much fun as investing is -- or should be, when it's done right.

Speaking with the passion and energy heard in his nationally syndicated radio show, Real Money with Jim Cramer, Cramer reveals both his Ten Commandments of Trading (Commandment #5: Tips are for waiters) and his Twenty-Five Rules of Investing (Rule #4: Look for broken stocks, not broken companies). He tells you how to:

• compare stock prices in a way that you can understand
• spot market tops and bottoms
• know when to sell
• rotate among cyclical stocks to catch the big moves
• and much more.

Drawing on information that Cramer himself has used to make millions on Wall Street, Jim Cramer's Real Money is filled with insider advice that really works.

Read Online: Jim Cramer's Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World

Chapter One: Staying in the Game

If you look through my wallet, you will find all the things that everyone carries: license, credit cards, pictures of my wife and kids, and some cash. But if you look deeper, in some of the crannies, you'll find two things no one else has: my first pay stub, a tattered, faded beauty from the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper from September 1977, and a snippet of a portfolio run from the lowest day of my life, October 8, 1998.

I keep these talismans with me wherever I go, because they remind me why I got into stocks and why I had to stay in stocks no matter what, because the opportunities are too great not to be in them. The $178.82 I made that first week as a general assignment reporter in Tallahassee serves as a reminder to me that a paycheck is almost never enough to make a decent living on and to save up for the necessities of later life. That torn and bedraggled stub, with its $30 in overtime and oversized take by the federal government, keeps me honest and reminds me where I am from, how I never want to go back there, and how hard work at your job isn't enough to make you rich. You have to invest to make that happen. If you invest well you should almost always be beating the return you get on your day job.

The other smudged rectangle of paper in my wallet, the one that obscures the right-hand corner of my wife's picture, bears a series of cryptic numbers: 190,259,865; 281,175,544; and 90,915,674. The last number has a big black minus sign right after it. That's a cutout from my daily portfolio run on the most disastrous day my hedge fund ever had, October 8, 1998, a day when I was down $90,915,674 -- that's right, more than $90 million on the $281 million that I was supposed to be managing. I had "lost" almost half the money under my management in a series of bets in the stock market that hadn't yet paid off, to put a positive spin on an unmitigated decline. At that moment, everyone -- my investors, my employees, the press, the public -- everyone had written me off, except for my wife, whom I had worked with for so many years and who knew never to count me out. "You've had it, Cramer, you are gone," the collective brokerage chorus told me. ...

Mad Money TV Show: Make Money with Money Manager Jim Cramer

James J. Cramer is host of CNBC's Mad Money; cofounder of TheStreet.com, where he is also an online columnist; and "Bottom Line" columnist for New York magazine.

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