According to a
SEC filing released on January 8th, Morgan Stanley now owns 10% of Microstrategy.
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftalkimg.com%2Fimages%2F2023%2F05%2F16%2Fblobf5a963476ff59fda.png&t=658&c=ZlaqgGwNblM_mw)
They now own 792,627 shares, equal to 10.9% of the total Class A shares (the ones with regular voting power).
With MicroStrategy trading at 531 on that day, that represented an investment worth around 490$ million.
Today a few days have passed, bitcoin is down a bit, and Microstrategy is now worth 495, so they lost 7%.
What if they had invested directly in BTC?
Let's look at the CME BRR index, the underlying spot index used to settle CME futures.
The index is down 21% from January 8th: from 40982 to 32502.
Just for an added comparison, what if they had invested in Grayscale (they are closed to investments, right now, but let's ignore that)
GBTC, from January 8th to January 11th fell from 44.42 to 37.40, of 16% (the premium compressed a little bit and helped reducing the loss).
hat:
So apparently Microstrategy lost way less than Bitcoin, and also less than GBTC.
Actually Microstrategy it is not a full Bitcoin company (yet)
If we look at my spreadsheet we see t
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftalkimg.com%2Fimages%2F2023%2F05%2F16%2Fblob56f3821c15c5394a.png&t=658&c=5BoK0xiWCKWBqw)
So MS bought 10% of a 28% Bitcoin Company.
Even thou Micheal Saylor pledged not to do so, they could sell their BTC stash tomorrow, drastically changing the outlook for the firm (for better or worse, let's discuss elsewhere).
What I am saying is that this choice is weird and largely sub-optimal.
Unless the SEC approved a fully regulated, supervised BTC Exchange-Traded Products (if not a proper ETF; but unlikely), investment managers won't have a better choice to buy "shady tech stocks who appear to be long bitcoin" of "suboptimal investment vehicles" who charge investors huge premiums.
Definitely, there is space for improvement from regulators.