Should You Stay Away From Jim Cramer?

Snark aside, concerns raised by industry veterans and investment advisers take the long view of Cramer and his impact on small investors.

"He kind of puts himself forward as the champion of retail investors, but had they listened to him on the [Bear Stearns] call, they would have lost a lot of money," said Roger Ehrenberg, the managing partner of IA Capital Partners in New York. "He empowers people to feel confident about buying and selling individual stocks, when in fact most people are ill-qualified to invest in that manner."

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Ehrenberg and others say that Cramer's show may encourage small investors to make frequent trades when it is really in their interest to invest in mutual funds and hold them for long periods of time.

"On 'Mad Money,' Cramer promotes a mindless short-term approach to markets by encouraging frenetic trading of individual stocks," David F. Swensen, who supervises the $20 billion endowment of Yale University, said in an e-mail to ABC News. "Such a high-cost, tax-inefficient strategy almost guarantees failure."

CNBC's Steel said Cramer sees success. He said that a charitable trust Cramer runs performed better than the S&P 500 Index last year.

"As a stock picker, Jim consistently outperforms the market," Steel said.

Last year, Canadian newspaper the National Post gave Cramer its own "booyah," reporting that Canadian stock picks Cramer made in April 2006 resulted in a 13.7 percent one-year return -- four percentage points higher than the Toronto Stock Exchange composite index.

Michael Zhuang, however, gives a lackluster assessment of Cramer's stock-picking prowess.

Zhuang, the president of MZ Capital, a Maryland-based investment advisory firm, analyzed stock picks Cramer made in January and February 2007.

On the financial Web site seekingalpha.com, Zhuang wrote that of Cramer's January picks, more than one-third -- 35.6 percent -- were accurate.

Zhuang arrived at his conclusion by taking stocks that Cramer said were bullish or bearish on and then comparing their one-year returns to that of the S&P 500.

Cramer's February '07 picks, Zhuang told ABC News, were considerably better, with 56 percent of Cramer's calls proving accurate.