There's a lot to potentially write about the latest South Park episode in which Stan, despite all his best efforts, literally gets sucked into Facebook (watch here) but I just want to focus quickly on a small segment of the show where Cartman imitates Jim Cramer, of CNBC's "Mad Money."
Cartman released a video podcast on Facebook that was a take off on Cramer's show, except instead of stocks, Cartman was giving advice about Facebook friends. Cartman urges everyone to drop Kyle as a Facebook friend because he recently added a "loser" who previously had no friends at all. Cartman has a great graph that shows Kyle's friend stock plummeting 500 percent.
As much as the entire episode was an attack on people putting too much "stock" in Facebook "friends" instead of real relationships and America's recent obsession with social networking, I think there was something secondary here about Cramer as well. Basically, Cartman was telling everyone to stop being Kyle's friend because everyone else stopped being his friend. It wasn't that Kyle was a bad friend, or that there was something wrong with him - it was simply that his popularity was going down.
I think we can make a direct comparison here with Cramer's style of investing. The value of the company really isn't that important - it's all about the trend of the market, who's exciting, who's dull, and riding the roller coaster. Real investing should be about evaluating a company and its prospects for long term growth and earnings, which will eventually be reflected in the price of the stock. To Cramer/Cartman, the only thing that's important is the quick buck or the quick popularity boost.
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