One doesn’t have to be Isaac Newton to realize that when a security goes vertical like some tech and credit card stocks have for almost this entire, extended bull market, they can also go the other way.

Momentum stocks have been experiencing some tough times over the last five weeks. After 10 years of sensational performance, many think they were due for a major correction.

But Jim Cramer of Mad Money fame penned a piece Thursday in which he seems convinced that some of his favorite stocks, notably Amazon, Visa and Mastercard, are trading like “Mexican jumping beans” all because of evil “voyeuristic ETFs” that are “completely hidden.”

So which ETF is the most serious culprit ruining Cramer’s life? It is iShares Edge MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF (MTUM). Incidentally, I suspect Cramer’s mood is not in a better state this week with the Dow down more than 600 points.

Apparently, MTUM is one of several “totally abusive ETFs out there that really do unlevel the playing field and make a mockery of the whole business,” he wrote.

So who is he calling morons and doofuses? It’s the “moron managers flitting all over the place, the kind Warren Buffett calls out as expensive doofuses,” who are constantly engaging in the risk-on, risk-off trades that always appear to poop on Cramer’s parade. And their current instrument is MTUM.

MTUM may be one of many vehicles raining on the parade, but it’s likely there are many other far more powerful algorithmic strategies making momentum investors miserable. In recent weeks, wizards like AQR’s Cliff Asness have sent apologies to investors talking about their underwhelming investment performance in recent weeks.

On some days quant strategies reportedly account for 50 percent of all trading volume. Some quants may use ETFs but they use many other vehicles as well.

But someone like Cramer, who once was a successful momentum investor himself (he claims to have beaten the S&P 500 by a few basis points in the 1990s), should know better. Momentum apparently has been designated its own asset class by serious academics. That's despite the fact that its underlying definition is simply buying stocks enjoying rapidly rising prices—and then selling them when they stop appreciating—strikes many as a variant of the greater fool theory.

In 1928, Will Rogers articulated this strategy with his typical flair. You buy stocks and they go up. When someone asked him what they should do if equities go down, Rogers replied, "Then you don't buy them."

In the last five years, Visa's share price has gone from $55 to about $150 in early October, while Mastercard’s climbed from $73 to over $220 before the latest downdraft. Even more remarkable is Amazon, which went from $1,000 to $2,000 in the last 12 months.

Having been humiliated so often by markets, I don’t pretend to be an investing wizard. But even I can see plastic is replacing cash and confess to owning small holdings in both Visa and Mastercard. If only ETFs like MTUM could do the same kind of damage to my other mutual funds, ETFs and stocks that it has done to the credit card concerns, I’d be a very happy investor.

But in the current market, they are just a few more momentum stocks with a light-asset business model and that should explain a lot. For its part, Amazon is trading at some unheard-of metric like 26 times book value.

Many people are searching for scapegoats when the reality is that the economy is entering the advanced phase of the cycle. Profit expansion is slowing at the same time as interest rates are rising. Reasons for financial markets to reprice assets abound.

Yet Cramer, who many people have told me is a well-meaning individual, believes otherwise. He seems convinced that quasi-proprietary indices like MTUM will eventually “take over the direction of the stocks, as the physical trading of the actual stocks the pressure these indices put on them.”

The problem with this argument is that it flies in the face of several facts. One reason ETFs were created was to cushion the impact of the collision between technology and regulation that surfaced in the 1980s with the advent of trading in stock index futures. That led to program trading, yesteryear's bogeyman.

Indeed, the dollar volume of futures trading soon dwarfed the actual cash volume of individual stock trading shortly after the derivatives were introduced. The end result was the October 1987 stock market crash, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 23 percent in a single day.

Today, many investors are worried about a credit market bomb, as bond trading has dried up over the last decade. But some think fixed-income ETFs could cushion the damage from this sort of potential market dislocation. When this happened during the financial crisis, ETFs tracking various bond indices were one of the view places investors could discover any approximation of what price their bonds might be valued at.

I’m not saying that ETFs are perfect vehicles or anything of the kind. But the problem lies with the high-tech, algorithmic, flash-trading momentum strategies, not the various different vehicles to package securities that are available to investors.