Jim Cramer announced he's dumping his Bitcoin stash. The reason: IBM's quantum computers might crack crypto's math in three to four years. Markets heard the news and bought anyway.
The CNBC host never actually showed proof of the sale. No wallet address, no position size, nothing on any exchange. He just said it on air on July 30th. Traders immediately treated the call as a contrarian signal to go long.
The Track Record of Fading Cramer
Betting against Cramer has become a meme, but the real money tells a messier story. Tuttle Capital launched an Inverse Cramer Tracker ETF in March 2023, betting his picks would flop. The short fund closed in February 2024, down 15.7% while the S&P 500 climbed 25.4%. Not exactly a screaming success.
Academic research backs this up. A 2012 study tracking 826 first-time buy calls found they pop 2.4% overnight, then reverse completely within about two weeks. The actual edge wasn't in inverting his opinion, but in fading the overnight retail rush that follows his show.
Cramer's crypto calls make the joke stick around though. He dismissed Bitcoin entirely on December 23, 2022, when it traded at $16,796. That timing didn't age well.
The Quantum Threat Is Real, But Not Yet
IBM and University of Chicago researchers did run a 70 logical qubit circuit in mid-July, which is legitimate progress. The gap between that and actually breaking Bitcoin's cryptography is enormous though. You'd need millions of stable qubits working in concert, not dozens of logical ones running for 16 minutes.
The timeline matters. IBM's chief executive Arvind Krishna said traders should get paranoid in three or four years. That's the same window he pegged for quantum moving IBM's own earnings, so it's more of a commercial target than a technical certainty.
Nobody's actually confirmed Cramer executed the sale. The announcement alone was enough to move the needle on trader sentiment, but whether he actually follows through remains unknown.
This article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset.
