Cramer's stock picks are worse than 50%. Actually, some professinals short his picks after 3 days. Despite of cramer's bad track record, when a short goes against you, when I was a group head, I would have asked my traders to take half off, simply for the sake of money management. a lot of times, we actually covered at high; but other times, we can put on the half we took off at higher prices. A good book to read is "Sold short" and "The art of short selling" Jim Chiano's stuff, if you can find, is also great.