Jon Stewart last night hammered Lenny “Nails” Dykstra, a former Mets centerfielder turned financial-advisor-in-bankruptcy, and then tagged TV financial personality Jim Cramer with a jarring comedic blast.

Dykstra touted himself in recent years as a successful investment advisor and was profiled in 2008 as a “financial whiz kid” on the HBO program Real Sports. During the interview on HBO he states how he did not read books because it was bad for his eyes.

Stewart also revived his public humiliation of Cramer by playing an interview of Cramer on the HBO show in which he hails former Mets hero Dykstra’s as a brilliant financial advisor, “one of the great ones in this business.”

On my drive home from work, I find myself listening to CNBC’s Fast Money because I realize that many of our clients and prospects receive this type of advice on a regular basis and it makes sense to try to keep abreast of popular investment advice.

After the rather dramatic rise in stock prices over the previous month and a half, the focus of these shows seem to be devoted to detecting the next correction, determining the precipitous fate of the dollar, and the extent of any upcoming inflation.

The show Fast Money epitomizes this. After all according to CNBC, these experts “give you the information normally reserved for the Wall Street trading floor, enabling you to make decisions that can make you money.” Well before paying much attention to what they think is next for the market, let’s see how the cast of Fast Money has done. A firm CXO Advisory Group did the heavy lifting for us. This is what they had to say:

The Fast Money experts have on average offered no “fast money.” Average raw cumulative returns for expert picks (black line) are negative for all weeks over the 13-week test horizon (before trading frictions).

The experts as a group perform very similarly to contemporaneous investments in SPY, an S&P 500 proxy (green line) on a cumulative return basis over nearly all of the 13-week test horizon.

The next chart depicts the average raw cumulative returns for the 188 long and 24 short picks of the Fast Money experts. (Short picks are investments that they feel will lose value so they bet against them.) The short picks include six recommendations to buy inverse funds. The long positions by themselves have underperformed SPY over most of the 13-week test period and indicate no stock picking ability.

The short positions alone generate positive cumulative returns for most of the 13 weeks in the test period. (This is the exact opposite of what they wanted.) Declines in the broad stock market over parts of the test period tend to aid the performance of short positions. However, as seen in the previous graph, the short recommendations do not make the experts outperform the overall stock market.

Can we compare the stock picking abilities of individual Fast Money experts?

None of the experts have generated attractive raw returns. In summary, the Fast Money experts as a group probably do not offer fast money with their stock picks, and their stock-picking ability as a group is unimpressive.

It seems to me that the Real Fast Money is actually represented by the general market portfolio. This represents the aggregate investments by all  investors and reflects every-one’s best estimate of how the market should be priced.

And while buying a market portfolio may seem pedestrian and its recommendation to do so will not be able to sustain an hourly trading show, it remains a better option.