Skip to content

2026

Do Financial Shows Pick Winning Stocks or Just Winning Sectors?

When a TV host or podcast guest recommends a stock that goes on to beat the market, it looks like obvious investing skill.

In reality, every public stock tip is two distinct bets wrapped into one:

  1. The Company Bet: Did the speaker pick an exceptional business? (Stock Selection Skill)
  2. The Sector Bet: Did they simply allocate to a winning sector? (Sector Allocation Skill)

If a speaker recommends five tech stocks during a historic tech rally, beating the broad market does not prove stock selection skill. It simply proves they were standing in the right room. If Information Technology as a group beat the S&P 500, the sector did the heavy lifting.

To separate company-level skill from sector tailwinds, we benchmarked over 37,000 scored recommendations across six major equity sectors from 12 qualifying financial shows and 50 finfluencers at the 6-month holding period. We benchmark each company against its matching Vanguard sector ETF (using the standard GICS classification) and against the broad market with SPY over the exact same holding dates.

Sector Alpha and Sector Leaderboards

Imagine a tech stock pick that beat the S&P 500 by 8 points in one year. In the same year, the tech sector ETF also beat the S&P 500 by 8 points. The speaker did not pick a good stock. The speaker picked a good sector.

finfluencers.trade measures these two things separately. Alpha in Sector = Stock Selection Skill + Sector Allocation Skill. You can see the split on Sector Leaderboards for finfluencers and shows, and on every profile.

Introducing Show Leaderboards & Interactive Profiles

Until now, finfluencers.trade gave you a finfluencer leaderboard and fairly basic per-person stats — enough to browse names, not enough to decide where your listening time should go.

This release is a major update. You can now rank entire shows and podcasts the same way you rank individual hosts, open a full profile for each show, compare panelists on rotating desks, and dig into finfluencer pages with the same holding-period tools throughout. The goal is simple: help you spend finite listening hours on sources that have actually delivered alpha vs the S&P 500 — whether that is one program or several.

What I Learned From 16,701 Jim Cramer Stock Picks

There is a popular online joke called "Inverse Cramer." The idea: if Jim Cramer says buy on TV, do the opposite, and you'll make money.

It's a fun meme. But is it actually true?

To find out, I analyzed every buy-side stock recommendation the finfluencers.trade pipeline extracted from Jim Cramer's CNBC show Mad Money between January 2018 and December 2024 — 16,701 calls in total — and tracked what happened to each stock afterwards.

The result is more interesting than the meme.

The full working paper is on SSRN. The data and scripts are public on GitHub.