What’s Flying Higher Than Bitcoin? The Software Company Buying Up Bitcoin
MicroStrategy shares are a more popular bitcoin play than the cryptocurrency itself for many individual investors
4 min
Bitcoin prices have surged about 40% since Election Day. MicroStrategy has climbed even faster.
The software company turned itself into a bitcoin buying machine in 2020 and now holds some $37 billion worth of tokens. For many individual investors, the stock is a more popular bitcoin play than the cryptocurrency itself and they are willing to pay up for it.
With a $91 billion market value, MicroStrategy is trading at more than twice the value of its underlying bitcoin. The shares have soared more than sixfold this year and 77% since Nov. 5, with traders betting that the digital-assets industry will flourish under President-elect Donald Trump . Bitcoin prices are hovering just below $95,000, after trading near $100,000 last week.
“MicroStrategy found a way to outperform bitcoin,” Michael Saylor , the company’s founder and executive chairman, said in an interview. “The way that we outperform bitcoin, in essence, is we just lever up bitcoin.”
And Saylor says he is just getting started. He unveiled an audacious plan just days before the election to hire investment banks to raise $42 billion in capital over three years through stock and bond offerings to buy more tokens. His company had $4.3 billion in convertible debt outstanding as of Oct. 29.
MicroStrategy’s mix of bitcoin maximalism and Wall Street-style financial engineering has paid off for its investors, but skeptics question whether it is sustainable.
Saylor’s heavy use of leverage, or borrowed money, to buy bitcoin backfired during the 2022 crypto-market meltdown when the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried ’s FTX dragged bitcoin prices below $16,000. Quarter after quarter, MicroStrategy incurred mounting losses tied to bitcoin and Saylor stepped down as CEO, a position he had held since 1989.
“This stock has become detached from reality,” said Andrew Left, a prominent short seller and founder of Citron Research.
Left describes himself as bullish on bitcoin itself and praised MicroStrategy in 2020 when it first began amassing bitcoin. But in a Thursday post on X , Left said he had taken out a bet against MicroStrategy, which caused its stock to tumble.
Some analysts warn MicroStrategy’s stunning run-up is part of a broader investor euphoria for speculative assets and will inevitably collapse. David Trainer, founder of research firm New Constructs, said MicroStrategy is a bad business by conventional metrics—for instance, it has posted a net loss for the past three quarters.
“It’s symptomatic of a market that has become obsessed with believing in get-rich-quick schemes,” Trainer said. “If you like bitcoin, go buy bitcoin. But don’t invest in a company that’s losing money and also buying bitcoin, because then you’ve sort of doubled your risk.”
Some traders say a key part of the stock’s appeal is its volatility, which can help amplify their gains over a short period.
Garrett Shirey , a barber in Florence, Ala., bought one share of MicroStrategy at $436.53 in his retirement account Tuesday afternoon and sold it at $472.40 Wednesday morning, notching a quick profit.
Restricted from purchasing bitcoin in his Roth IRA account, the 39-year-old crypto enthusiast has had to settle for bitcoin proxies like MicroStrategy stock and bitcoin exchange-traded funds. He holds some shares of the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF .
“I don’t think bitcoin went up 8% in the last 24 hours, but MicroStrategy did,” said Shirey, who has been investing in cryptocurrencies since the pandemic.
Saylor said he came up with the bitcoin strategy in 2020 when Covid-19 forced lockdowns and the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero. MicroStrategy was competing with tech giants such as Microsoft and falling behind. The company was under pressure to return cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends.
“It was either a fast death or a slow death, or take a risk, do something out of the box,” he said.
Saylor has often boasted about MicroStrategy’s volatility. “When you embrace volatility, then you’re outperforming the S&P,” he said during last month’s earnings call.
MicroStrategy’s volatility has helped it find ready buyers for its repeated issuances of convertible bonds—debt that can eventually be converted into shares, if the stock price rises to a specified level. Such bonds are often purchased by hedge funds that protect themselves against a collapse in the stock’s price by going short, or placing a bet that the stock will fall. Such funds generally don’t focus on whether the company is a good long-term investment, and instead seek to profit from the volatility of its stock.
MicroStrategy is an attractive trade for convertible-bond arbitragers, said Vadim Iosilevich, a veteran hedge-fund trader in New York.
“We can definitely agree that the volatility will be there,” he said.
Some investors are turning to ETFs that seek to amplify the return of MicroStrategy shares using borrowed money or derivative contracts. One such fund, the Defiance Daily Target 2x Long MSTR ETF aims to double the daily return of the stock and has attracted $1.8 billion in assets since it launched in August. Other funds allow traders to make inverse bets.
Chase Furey , a 25-year-old trader in Newport Beach, Calif., said he started buying bitcoin-related stocks including Coinbase Global, MicroStrategy and BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF in October. Hoping to turbocharge the gains, he moved all of his investments, worth about $112,000, into the Defiance ETF instead and has grown his portfolio to about $400,000.
The Harvard graduate, who studied economics in college, convinced his parents to let him manage $700,000 of their retirement assets. He said he came up with a “less dangerous and smarter” plan for them, investing 27% of their portfolio in the Defiance ETF and the rest in MicroStrategy shares. The money has more than doubled to $1.8 million, he said.
“I think bitcoin could hit $400,000 and I think MicroStrategy could possibly 10x from where it is now by the end of next year, so that’s kind of my game plan with that,” he said.
Even some bitcoin bulls have expressed unease about the risks investors face by betting on MicroStrategy. Mike Novogratz , the billionaire CEO of crypto-trading firm Galaxy Digital , warned in an interview on CNBC Thursday that bitcoin could fall 20% after peaking at $100,000—in part because of leveraged bets on MicroStrategy available through some exchange-traded funds.
“The crypto community is levered to the gills right now, so there will be a correction,” Novogratz said.
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Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.
3 min
Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.
When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.
The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.
But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.
Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.
After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.
“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”
The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.
Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.
In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.
Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.
“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”
Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.
“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.
The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.
The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.
In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.
Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.
Here’s how they are looking at artificial intelligence, interest rates and economic pressures.
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