Jim Cramer's guide to investing: How did Cramer become interested in the market?

CNBC's Jim Cramer said he felt drawn to the stock market when he was in the fourth grade.

He usually searched through his father's copies of the Philadelphia Bulletin for sports and comics, but soon became curious about the business section, which had tables markedly different from the ones with batting averages he usually studied.

"I was also a curious kid," he said. "Curiosity's always been both a blessing and a curse for me, not unlike the proverbial cat that's always probing, looking and occasionally jumping on some hot stoves."

His father gave him a rudimentary explanation of the market, comparing the way investors studied stocks' performance to how sports fans studied that of players. Cramer was eager to start trying to track stocks and figure out which ones would go higher, so he began keeping a ledger with various company names. Many of the stocks that saw gains at the time were in the defense sector, going up in tandem with the Vietnam War.

Cramer's childhood stock market "obsession" convinced him that it's never too early to start training young investors.

"Get them started early, and they may play for life because, alas, the stock market, it's a long-term contest," he said. "The earlier you get in, the more you can potentially win over the long-haul." $S&P 500 Index(.SPX.US)$ $Nasdaq Composite Index(.IXIC.US)$ $Dow Jones Industrial Average(.DJI.US)$