On first read, I also thought that the CBS article is actually including the odds than 4 randomly selected stocks will be the best market performers. But I didn

On first read, I also thought that the CBS article is actually including the odds than 4 randomly selected stocks will be the best market performers. But I didn't take the time to compute those ;-) Nevertheless, it's totally ill-placed to blame Cramer for this. The journalist is using this low-probability to say: "Thus, picking the four best performers as stocks to sell is the next closest thing to being statistically impossible. [...] By any measure of statistics I can think of, these four awful stock calls are telling of Cramer's incredibly poor ability to call stock sells. It not only surpassed my wildest imagination of just how bad anyone could be..." For the 1 out of 16, you're also right. I was just keeping the same hypothesis as the one in the article of a uniformly random distribution.