Wall Street Can't Beat Michael Saylor's Runaway Crypto Engine
(Bloomberg) -- Wall Street keeps inventing new ways to ride the digital-currency boom — from amped-up ETFs and tokenized funds to structured products — and crypto competitors keep circling. But the trade still delivering the biggest rewards belongs to Michael Saylor.
His firm, now branded as Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy Inc., pioneered the original capital-markets hack in this era of retail speculation. The playbook? Sell stock and debt. Use the proceeds to buy Bitcoin. Watch the market rip. Then do it all over again.
After huge gains last year, his capital-market machine keeps running — for now. Strategy shares are up about 26% this year, beating Bitcoin's 16% gain, and currently rank as one of the best-performers in the Nasdaq 100. Traders are still lavishing a hefty premium on Saylor's stock — well above the value of the firm's Bitcoin holdings — a dynamic no ETF can match.
'Saylor was the first, he was the earliest and he's got the most leverage,' said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak Co. 'He's not just playing Bitcoin, but also his own stock and the stock market to his advantage — and using leverage at the right times.'
That premium acts like rocket fuel in up markets, helping Strategy eclipse the returns of not just Bitcoin, but the ETFs designed to keep up with it. It's outpacing all 74 crypto ETFs in the US bar one.
It's even outgunning double-leveraged ETFs tracking the firm itself. MSTX and MSTU — designed to deliver two times the stock's underlying returns — are each down about 1% for the year. These funds reset their exposure every trading day, so even in an uptrend, choppy price action can degrade longer-term returns — known as the volatility drag.
Strategy, by contrast, is a self-reinforcing crypto engine. As its stock rallies, it unlocks more balance-sheet firepower, turning market momentum into more crypto accumulation. As Bitcoin has hit records this month, the trade keeps spinning.
Wall Street is churning out more diversified products, and the number of Strategy competitors is growing with President Donald Trump's media company the latest to join the fray with a $2.5 billion Bitcoin treasury deal. Still, what's proving hard to replicate is the sheer belief system surrounding Saylor himself.
His firm isn't merely a Bitcoin proxy, it's a vehicle for crypto maximalists to express conviction in their faith — a vehicle that's reflexive, levered and narrative-driven. In other words, the stock doesn't just move with Bitcoin, it feeds off it. For retail believers, the premium is the point, and that's put Strategy in a unique category.
That means despite the arrival of cheaper, institutional-grade Bitcoin offerings like BlackRock's IBIT, Strategy remains a market story that no ETF can match. The company's market cap has surged from around $1 billion to over $100 billion over the past five years — ever since Saylor first revealed his Bitcoin-buying program. Strategy now holds more than $60 billion of Bitcoin, by far the most of any of its copycats.
It has also laid out plans to raise $84 billion to buy more, by selling a combination of shares and fixed-income instruments.
The trade cuts both ways, of course. When Bitcoin slumped in 2022, Strategy plunged more. And that was before it leaned even harder into leverage. If the crypto rally reverses, the dynamic that lifts Saylor's stock in the good times could fuel declines in the bad.
For now, though, the success has sparked a wave of imitators, with at least 30 publicly listed companies in the US doing so. Meanwhile Bernstein analysts project that the digital currency could see $330 billion in inflows via corporate treasuries before 2030. Saylor has welcomed the trend.
'It's a phenomenal story — for Bitcoiners, it's a huge bull thesis,' said Strahinja Savic, head of data and analytics at FRNT Financial. 'If I had to list off the top three reasons why I'm bullish Bitcoin, the corporate adoption is up there.'
--With assistance from Dave Liedtka.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
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