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Here's an anecdote: my dad knows about bitcoin. Despite my offers to set him up with cold storage he never decided to do it. Here comes MSTR and he's buying it like crazy in his Fidelity or Schwab or whatever he uses. Doesn't want to talk about bitcoin. Wants to talk about MSTR.
A group of investors I know meet once a month to talk about potential deals they have heard about. They talk about bitcoin every single month. Nobody went further than one guy who holds it on an exchange. Here comes MSTR and now several of them are gobbling it up.
Both cases people knew about bitcoin, bitcoin self custody, and a general idea of the risks of not your keys...yet it wasn't accessible to them until they could buy it in something like this. Honestly, they weren't even as interested in the ETFs.
At least for retail, it's got something to do with making bitcoin accessible in a way these guys feel comfortable with. Maybe?
That was one of my hypotheses too, but are these people enough to move the market? Does retail really have that much influence? But I definitely think your observation is common, I know some people like that too
are these people enough to move the market?
That's the thing: surely they aren't, right? I mean, there can't be that many couch potato old guys with extra money hanging around to play the stock market (but who are not serious enough to bother learning what real self-custody looks like or to be concerned about actually using money the state can't wreck)!
That’s basically a cousin of the trapped capital idea, right?
There are bitcoin believers who command a lot of capital that can’t easily be put directly into bitcoin, so they pay Saylor to do it for them.
More like custom/custody/bitcoin-wrapped-in-SEC-regulated-equity
Yeah. But it doesn't explain the premium, because they could buy more "bitcoin" for their buck through the ETF.
Then it might belong in my bubble category. Time will tell.
Doesn't want to talk about bitcoin. Wants to talk about MSTR.
That's funny because at this point, what's the difference??
in the case of my dad, he's heard me hammer on about censorship resistance, digital freedom money a little too much perhaps. MSTR is sweet gains, baby.
Their bull market comfort, our bear market cheap sats.
Degenerate gamblers?
Yep. They call themselves "wall street".
Wouldn’t they go further and buy a bunch of Fartcoins or whatever?
Speaking of which, you reeeeaally gotta take two minutes here and watch Remy's latest for Reason
https://reason.com/video/2025/06/02/remy-strategic-fartcoin-reserve/
Obviously I already have. I love Remy.
man, I laughed. Watched it like 3x on repeat last night LOL. epic
I'll propose a 3rd possibility: automated trading bots that trade on historical correlations. All they can see is that these companies look like leveraged bets on bitcoin's price and so if you expect bitcoin to go up, you expect these companies to go up more, not for any fundamental reason but just because that's what the data shows.
That probably goes in category 2.
If that’s what’s happening, then there should be examples of this happening with other assets, right?
I'd argue that there probably are. It's not something I ever studied, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some research out there about macro effects of trading bots.
I already know that the stock market is getting increasingly self-referential because of passive ETFs that just trade based on deterministic rules, but the rules they trade by actually affects stock performance in the aggregate
I’ve really only read about this during the rise of high frequency trading.
Accelerate bitcoin adoption? Institutionally short global capital and long bitcoin?
But fundamentally they're just paying someone to accumulate bitcoin with a promise to share the gains, when they could accumulate it themselves. Why trust GameStop to manage this asset for you?
GameSTop, no -- but Saylor? Metaplanet? probs
Owning BTC makes you that bitcoin guy, buying MSTR makes you just another investor chasing gains. Social camouflage matters more than people wanna admit.
Just buy bitcoin and tell people you bought MSTR then, or stop feeling the need to disclose all of your investments to anyone.
There are more options.
- Stocks are always priced for future growth, services, products.
- Index ETF inflows
- Most stocks are overpriced considered their book value (see 4: passive investing)
- The BTC yield has a future discount (de novo P/E ratio)
- The converts and perpetuals trade at a premium (free bitcoin basically)
Most stocks do more than hold an underlying asset.
As I ponder this, the two answers that seem most plausible are 1) trapped capital, and 2) crazy financial bubble.
Otherwise, I can’t wrap my head around people who don’t believe in bitcoin enough to YOLO HODL, like us, simultaneously believing in it enough to drive up the treasury company valuations.
If you believe in bitcoin, you hodl. If you don’t, then you don’t believe in bitcoin treasury companies either.