According to a report from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, filed Sept. 27, the Morgan Stanley Europe Opportunity Fund, which invests in established and emerging companies throughout Europe, owned 58,116 shares of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, or GBTC, as of July 31. At the time of publication, the price of GBTC is $34.28, making the investment bank’s exposure to Bitcoin (BTC) roughly $2 million — Morgan Stanley reported thatthe shares cost $2.4 million.
Previous filings show that Morgan Stanley has increased its shares of GBTC by more than 105% since April. Cointelegraph reported in June that the investment bank held 28,298 GBTC, worth roughly $1.3 million at the time.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-doubles-exposure-to-bitcoin-through-grayscale-sharesnot sure if it's cause they're so bullish with BTC and couldn't find a cheaper alternative, or they're just betting on the ETF that'll erase the current 16% discount
Seems like purchase amounts that are hardly even worth reporting on... - an overall amount for ants, really - especially I would consider that to be quite lower than .1% of their investible assets... not sure what their overall investible asset amounts would be, but the total amount of GBTC that they hold is 58,116 (about $2.5 million or so of value at today's price).
For comparison, the article mentions that Ark invest holds about 8.3 million GBTC - which would be about $3.5 billion - which is also only about 0.69% of Ark Invests' total investible assets.
Seems to me that a lot of these BIG institutions, even if they do end up investing in something like GBTC, are going to be quite handicapped in their need to continuously reallocate and to NOT allow their likely to be best performing asset (talking about the underlying BTC to ride), which surely is a dynamic that is better for smaller investors and investors who may well not be handicapped by such requirements.
For example, in my own investment portfolio, in late 2014, I authorized myself to invest up to 10% of my investible assets into BTC, but I overrode my own authorization limitations and got up to something like 13.5% by the time late 2015 came along, and we know what happened after that in terms of BTC price performance.
With my overall investment portfolio, due to BTC price appreciation (and other movements) the BTC portion went from about 13.5% to 85% with the 2017 bubble, and then it regressed down to around 45% in the 2018/2019-ish crashes. But then with the 2020/2021 it rebounded back into the 90% proportion territory, and sure part of my point is that as an individual I have near absolute discretion regarding how much of my winner to let ride and to let continue to ride - but if I was a larger traditional investor (of other people's money), I would be hard pressed to keep so much value - percentage wise in any one investment, especially something like BTC.... So, it does seem to me that individuals and smaller players could well profit disproportionately by their greater discretion and flexibility in portfolio management - even if the BIGGER player financial institutions do continuously strive to advise folks about the various values of reallocating and keeping proportions that are largely within the original allocation levels... which I would argue would have caused me to have a decent amount of my overall wealth tied up in underperforming asset classes, such as equities (and holy shit bonds?) and perhaps properties that have their own issues of management and expenses.
