Mad Money is an American TV program about personal finance hosted by Jim Cramer that began airing on CNBC on March 16, 2005. Its main focus is investment and speculation, mainly in publicly traded securities. In a notable departure from the mad money CNBC programming style before its arrival, MadMoney com presents itself in an entertainment style format rather than a news broadcasting format.
Jim Cramer defines mad money as the money one "can use to invest in stocks ... not retirement money, which you want in 401K or an IRA, a savings account, bonds, or the most conservative of dividend-paying stocks."
Jim Cramer Mad Money has been quoted as saying that Mad Money "is a show that is about education, entertainment and making money". The show features a disclaimer at the start of the program.
Business investing is a term with several closely-related meanings in business management, finance, and economics, related to saving or deferring consumption. Investing is the active redirection of resources: from being consumed today, to creating benefits in the future; the use of assets to earn income or profit.
An investment is the choice of the individual, after thorough analysis, to place or lend money in a vehicle (e.g. property, stock securities, bonds) that has sufficiently low risk and provides the possibility of generating favorable returns over a period of time. Placing or lending money in a vehicle that risks the loss of the principal sum or that has not been thoroughly analyzed is, by definition speculation, not investment.
In the case of investment, rather than store the good produced or its money equivalent, the investor chooses to use that good either to create a durable consumer or producer good, or to lend the original saved good to another in exchange for either interest or a share of the profits.
In the first case, the individual creates durable consumer goods, hoping the services from the good will make his life better. In the second, the individual becomes an entrepreneur using the resource to produce goods and services for others in the hope of a profitable sale. The third case describes a lender, and the fourth describes an investor in a share of the business.
In each case, the Mad Money consumer obtains a durable asset or investment, and accounts for that asset by recording an equivalent liability. As time passes, and both prices and interest rates change, the value of the asset and liability also change.