CNBC Jim Cramer He said he was drawn to the stock market when he was in fourth grade.
He usually looked for sports and comics in his father's copies of the Philadelphia Bulletin, but he soon became curious about the business section, which had tables noticeably different from the ones showing batting averages he used to study.
"I was a curious kid, too," he said. "Curiosity has always been both a blessing and a curse for me, not unlike the proverbial cat who is always probing, staring, and occasionally jumping on some hot stoves."
His father gave him a rudimentary explanation of the market, comparing the way investors studied the performance of stocks to the way sports fans studied the performance of players. Cramer was eager to start trying to track stocks and figure out which ones would go up, so he began keeping a ledger with several company names. Many of the stocks that posted gains at the time were in the defense sector, rising in tandem with the Vietnam War.
Cramer's childhood "obsession" with the stock market convinced him that it's never too early to start training young investors.
"Get them started early and they can play for life because, unfortunately, the stock market is a long-term competition," he said. “The sooner you get in, the more you can potentially earn in the long run.”
