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How those ahead? Stay ahead. Hey, I'm Kramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Kramerica. Other people want to make friends. I'm just trying to make a little money. My job's not just entertain, but to teach you. So call me at 1-800-743-CBC or tweet me. Jim Cramer. In a bull market, there is nothing worse than watching the averages roar higher while your portfolio just sits there barely moving. It makes you feel like a complete dope, doesn't it? Like the stock market must be some sort of total shell game. But really it just means you might be making a few basic mistakes. That's why tonight I'm devoting the whole show to my playbook for taking advantage of a short term rally. Not to be confused with the so called bear market rally, which is a bogus term people throw around whenever stocks go up at a time when the intelligentsia thinks they should be going down. Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Yep. I want to give you my game plan for handling short term gains. Now I know what a lot of you are thinking. What kind of incompetent doofus needs a guy to make money and rally? What's next? Is Kramer going to draw us a diagram explaining how to pick your nose? I mean man, potty training. Should I just start reading picture books to children? Hey, we've already got the animal scout effect and reading rainbows. Been off the air for more than a decade. Maybe you feel like that. That's the same level of difficulty as making money when the stock market's on fire. Who needs help when the Dow's up hundreds of points in a day? Or even better, during a multi day rally. A real run, a buy fest. Do you really need my advice? To help you deal with what? Huge profits? No, I'm not buying in that biggie small story of investing mo Money mo problems. But knowing how to approach a quick run the right way can make you a better investor. And tonight I want to teach you some of the discipline that we demonstrate for the CNC Investing Club all the time. Sure, everybody makes money in a big rally. It can even feel like you're running your portfolio is running itself. Doesn't feel like that. But I'm not here to talk about how to make the most money possible when the market's up big. Honestly, not that crucial. No. The most important lesson for dealing with a major short term move higher is that you always have to work hard to prepare yourself for the future. Otherwise you'll end up letting some great opportunities to sell, sell, sell, sell past you. Buy, sell, sell, sell. That's right. Just as we can't give in despair when the market's down, you simply don't want to give in to euphoria and buy. Bye bye. When the market's worry. That's not when you should buy. It is when you should be taking some chips off the table. Remember, you don't actually have a profit until you sell something. You aren't making money until the register is wrong. And the idea that you should buy and hold through both the best of times and the worst of times and has proven to be incredibly foolish. With only very few exceptions, you need to use strength to lighten up. Particularly on stocks of companies with deteriorating fundamentals. That's why I always insist you do your stock homework. Because how else will you know what to unload if you don't want to do it yourself? You know what? You can join our club, the CNBC Investing Club. And we do a lot of homework for you and with you. Why is it so hard to sell to strength? Good question. Let me put it this way. Nobody wants to miss a rally. If you sold every stock you own right before a huge up day, you feel like a stooge. Not even Larry, Curly or Mo. I mean, maybe the dreaded Shemp. Let's look at it another way. Say you're in stocks for the rally and you have massive gains, but you don't do anything. You let them ride, so to speak. And then gradually, or maybe not so gradually, your stocks come back down. If you hang on for too long, if you let your gains ride until they evaporate, how is that any different from missing the entire rally? It isn't. Making lots of money on a great day or a great month or great year is wonderful, but you can't feel a rally is just a day or a few Days where your portfolio went up in value, nothing more. You need to see it as a time to take action, even if you don't fancy yourself a trader. And try not to time the market. Even if you're like that, and I encourage you to be like that, you have to make an exception for some very good but sharp up rallies. That's what I'm talking about. Just you need to remember the good days during the sell offs to keep yourself in the game. You remember the down days when the market's roaring. To keep yourself tethered to reality, don't pass up an opportunity to trim your positions just because you're in stocks for the long haul. As an investor, not a trader, I'm not telling you to blow out of the positions. That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about doing sell, sell, sell. Being an investor does not absolve you of the need to have judgment. In other words, you should approach every rally with a grain of pessimism about what's coming next. That shouldn't be that hard. Think about this like the post Covid meltdown in 2022. Not many one. Just sell in late 2021. It looked too great, right? Because we had an unbelievable bull market where buying the dips made you a fortune. But then the Fed declared war on inflation and those gains disappear. If you had sold stocks gradually on the way up, as I told you to do, you were in much better shape as the market spent the next 11 months just getting obliterated. There's nothing wrong with feeling good about a rally. Someone with some violent mood swings that are happening, reaching for that cheap scotch line on a dirty linoleum floor. When you get that really bad tape can tell you I recognize the value of celebrating your stocks when times are good. Euphoria is fine, as long as it doesn't lead to complacency. Complacency is your nemesis on a big update. You can be thrilled. You just don't. Don't forget that you're getting a terrific opportunity to lighten up with some of the stocks. That's what short term rallies are for. But it's very easy to be swept away by the positivity. When the market's up and everybody's optimistic, the last thing people want to do is sell. Once you believe in the market again, when everything seems wonderful, how could you ever want to sell a stock? In theory, we all know we're supposed to buy low and sell high. But in practice, the that could be a lot harder than it sounds. This is why we constantly teach you the discipline of selling into strength when you join the club. Because we do it all the time with the travel Trust would peel some off. Look, I know the feeling. You're sitting there watching the gains roll in and you feel like selling some stock would be the most insane thing in the world. Because what happens as rally keeps going doesn't matter. We sell into strength, but we also never sell all at once. That way timing is less of an issue. Take some off and if the rally holds up well, you can sell more later. The name of the game is preparation. While there's no real way to prepare for a rally other than by owning stocks, you can use a rally to prepare yourself for potential down days in the future. It's a little counterintuitive, but it works. The best time to adjust your portfolio like that is is when stocks are going higher, not when they're going lower. Think about what you'll need if the market goes south and consider what you can do for your portfolio today, the day of the rally that you couldn't do yesterday. The simple answer is that you can sell part of position to take advantage of higher prices. Remember, we never ever buy or sell all at once. That's not my style. But on big up days you can sell in larger increments. In the rest of the show, I'm going to go through the whole mad money rally playbook and explain what to sell, how to sell it and why you're selling. But right now, here's the bottom line. When the stock market's had a big short term run, short term, don't get carried away by the optimism. Instead, keep your head on straight, check your emotions, focus on the long term and think about ringing the register, especially on stocks that might be getting too high. More on that later. Let's go to Michael in Pennsylvania please. Michael.
