BlackBerry's QNX Rally Tips Into a Meme Trade as Cramer Flips Bullish

From Re-Rating to Meme Trade

The fundamental case that launched this move is real, but none of it is new this week. The base trigger was CIBC raising its target to $8.50 with an Outperform rating, layered onto a QNX growth narrative, eight straight quarters of improving GAAP profitability, and a FedRAMP High re-certification that keeps BlackBerry as the only critical-event-management vendor cleared at the U.S. government's top security tier. That stack was already priced and re-priced through late May.

What's driving this specific 14.83% leg is different in kind. There is no new QNX contract, no fresh upgrade — the stock is now running on AI hopes and momentum more than incremental news. At $10.22 the stock sits more than double the Street consensus of roughly $5 that persisted even through a 153% six-month surge. When price runs this far past every published target on no fresh catalyst, the marginal buyer is positioning, not analysis.

Cramer Flips, Retail Piles In

The clearest tell that this has crossed into sentiment-trade territory is who's now talking about it. Jim Cramer — who called BlackBerry "a dice roll" and "a total spec" in March 2025 — reversed Thursday, saying it has "really interesting technology in the auto world" and "I think it goes higher." That kind of mainstream endorsement arriving after a stock has already doubled is a classic late-cycle signal, not an early one.

On the retail side, the debate is now explicitly meme mania versus growth story. Bulls point to CFO Tim Foote standing firm on the physical-AI vision and guiding QNX revenue growth around 15%; skeptics in the same thread flag the move as "unnatural & too fast," attributing it to momentum and short-covering rather than the business. Both are right. The QNX re-rating is genuine and the current leg is a positioning chase stacked on top of it.

What Settles It

With the stock trading on attention rather than news, the next hard data point is Q1 earnings on June 25. That's three weeks of pure sentiment between here and any fundamental check, which is exactly the window where a meme-amplified move either consolidates or reverses on profit-taking.

The asymmetry is stark: a stock at $10.22 needs QNX to actually deliver against a $5 consensus to justify the price, and June 25 is the first chance to show it. Until then this is a reflexive trade — Cramer, mainstream coverage, and short-covering feeding a move that the underlying numbers haven't yet caught up to. The catalyst that started it has gone quiet; what's left is the crowd.