On Jan. 27, 2025, Jim Cramer, a legendary Mad Money host, urged his audience to buy Bitcoin and dump MicroStrategy stocks. Is Bitcoin doomed? No, really?
If you are not familiar with Jim Cramer yet, you probably don’t know why his investment bets are talked about massively on the web but are hardly taken seriously. Long story short, some of Cramer’s predictions were 180 degrees from what happened. His reputation as the man whose market forecasts are fully opposite to what comes after is outstanding and meme-rich.
On Jan. 27, 2025, answering the TV viewer’s call, Cramer said, “If you wanna own Bitcoin, own Bitcoin. I own Bitcoin, you should own Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a great thing to add.”
The crypto community expresses disturbance, as Cramer’s praise for Bitcoin may suggest that Bitcoin is on the brink of collapse. On the other hand, Cramer’s distaste for MSTR gives MicroStrategy bulls reasons for optimism as if Cramer is wrong again, MSTR is about to moon.
Who is Jim Cramer?
Jim Cramer is a TV personality with a background in hedge investment. Cramer hosts the Mad Money segment on CNBC and writes for TheStreet.com, which he also co-founded. He is famously expressive as a host and regularly gives out turbo-confident stock picks (on TV, on X, and elsewhere). As mentioned above, he was often bullish on weak investments and skeptical towards those about to show their strength.
If you need a clear example of Jim as a lousy market forecaster, we can recall what he said one year before his latest statement, in which he urges people to buy Bitcoin. In January 2024 he said that Bitcoin is “topping out.” One year later, the Bitcoin value has doubled.
People who follow the Bitcoin price trends know that predicting the BTC crash within 18 months after the halving is pure madness. It takes all the historical data to ignore to say that Bitcoin is going to leave soon, months before halving. However, Cramer did it and made people think his bets were random once again.
What’s more funny is that days before the “topping out” prediction, he claimed that “Bitcoin is here to stay.” A true legend.
Other notable bloopers include the urge to invest in Silicon Valley Bank weeks before its collapse, the Nvidia wrongs saga (see the tweet above), and calls to dump Netflix (in 2012) and Hewlett Packard (in 2012) months before these stocks doubled.
Inverse Jim Cramer ETF
No wonder Cramer soon deserved an “inverse indicator” fame, meaning that you should listen to Cramer and act straight opposite to what he says. If Jim is bullish on some stock, sell it! If he considers some asset irrelevant, it’s time to buy!
Rather, this attitude was a joke, but the X account named Inverse Cramer, posting the Cramer picks-related tweets, gained over 320k followers. To make things more mind-blowing, in 2022, Tuttle Capital Management released the notorious Inverse Jim Cramer ETF comprised of stocks Jim was skeptical about!
The ETF has been updating quickly as Cramer delivered more and more stock picks, sometimes flipping his sentiment towards some of the investments. That was crazy. The Inverse Jim Cramer ETF was closed about a year after its launch, outliving the Long Cramer Tracker ETF, though, an ETF that genuinely followed Cramer’s advice.
According to Tuttle, the “inverse Jim” was closed because updating the contents of this ETF was hard, while the assets under management value was pretty low at around $2 million.
Do people believe that Cramer is always saying the opposite of what is about to come?
Jokes aside, Cramer is a seasoned professional with a degree from Harvard and a Goldman Sachs background. It is rather the format of Mad Money that makes him look strange and funny because he has to pick too many stocks every week and comment on the stocks requested by the people who call CNBC to ask Cramer’s opinion.
Like many professionals, Cramer can be wrong, and that’s alright. One of the proofs of Cramer’s decency is the fact that the Inverse Jim Cramer ETF did pretty badly. It existed for too little time to judge, but during the lifetime of this ETF, its result was negative. At the end of its existence, it was 15% down against the 25% S&P 500 gain for the same period.
It explains well why the crypto community meets Cramer’s praise for Bitcoin with an easy heart, posting memes about the soon Bitcoin crash without taking this probability at face value.