I think there are only 3 things relevant right now and here are the 3 things.
The halving is coming with 100% certainty.
And as far as I can see, most of the selling of #BTC    in the market is the bitcoin miners that have to sell in order to pay their electricity bills & pay their debt expenses & their operating expenses.
So that amount of selling pressure is going to be cut in half in a few months, so we know that’s coming.
And then we know there a spot Bitcoin ETF coming and when that comes we plug into Wall Street and the entire banking system.
And then finally that fair value accounting is coming and when that happens the objective will go away.
And now you’re going to introduce this as a conversation into hundreds of boardrooms.
They will not move in a week. They move quarterly but over the course of 12 quarters, you’ll start to see company after company looking at this & you’ll start to see a reallocation of assets.
At the end of the day, corporations only hold 2 assets.
They hold cash and they hold bonds and so if Bitcoin is available as an asset pari passu to a bond, then you’ll see a reallocation from bonds to Bitcoin.
And then in the institutional investor side, you’ve got all these people holding real estate, holding commodities, holding gold, holding ETF and S&P indexes and the like.
And if they start to reallocate and they will, 1% and 2% and 5%. Then you’re going to have something that has never happened in the history of the world which is you’ve got an ETF on a commodity that is scarce.
Every other ETF in the world is on an asset that is not scarce, it’s inflationary.
You can make more buildings, you can make more real estate, you can make more gold, you can make more commodities.
You can make $4 billion worth of any of any of those things.
The underlying producers produce more of the asset to deflate or to depreciate the price.
With Bitcoin, when $100 billion flows into the Bitcoin Spot ETF, there won’t be any ability for any producer to produce any more bitcoin.
And so you can’t really compare it to the spot and ETF of gold because gold is an inflationary asset and you can’t compare it to ETF’s on real estate or on bonds or on equity.
You really have to say this is the first time we ever plugged Wall Street into an asset that you cannot produce any more of.
And so nobody knows what will happen except that if you reason from first principles, you know that it’s got to actually perform better than all the other asset ETFs because the underlying fundamentals are just better.
But let me lay out three possible ways to invest in Bitcoin.
One if you buy Bitcoin, the underlying asset.
The second is you buy the Spot ETF.
The third is you buy @MicroStrategy.
Okay, so we talked about the headaches of buying Bitcoin, the underlying asset.
You have to do it on a crypto exchange and put in place parallel custody, compliance, compensation control systems. So that’s the challenge of that.
The closest thing, the most compelling idea for a plain vanilla Bitcoin investment of an institutional investor is you buy the Spot ETF, you’re be getting 1 to 1 correlation.
For $1 million you put in you’re getting $1 million of Bitcoin. What’s the positive?
It’s marginal, it’s good collateral. I can buy in a second no money down and I don’t need to build parallel custody control compensation systems.
So all my problems are handled by Wall Street.
What’s the cost? 50 to 100 basis points a year.
Okay so if I charge you 1% per year over the course of 20 years or over the course of your lifetime, it means that kinda I take 20% of the money you invested at 1%.
So there’s a cost 50 basis points means I get 10% of your money approximately.
But having said it all, I would pay you 50 to 100 basis point in order to be plugged in to Wall Street and it’s not a problem.
It’s a lot better than the alternative which is rebuild all their systems and then finance themselves.
So MSTR is not that. MSTR you can think of as a levered long Bitcoin company that pays you a yield.
Okay, so I’m not going to call it an ETF, because we are not a financial company but we have $4.4 billion plus of Bitcoin and $2 billion plus of debt.
So what we’ve done is we’ve levered the balance sheet with debt that cost us about one and a half percent interest.
So MSTR takes advantage of its position as an operating company to do something that an ETF can’t do.
An ETF can’t issue junk bonds. An ETF can’t issue convertible bonds. An ETF can’t do like an ATM, like we can could do, and an ETF can’t buy Bitcoin with cash flows.
So we have a lot of flexibility as an operating company and we don’t charge that fee.
So we have $4.5 billion of bitcoin but we don’t charge $45 million a year.
So the real idea here is, what if I created an investment vehicle that paid you a yield instead of charging you a fee?
And what If I was able to borrow money at one and a half percent interest?
I borrowed a billion dollars at 0% interest and bought Bitcoin with it.
Let me give you a theoretical, if you get a 2% yield instead of paying a 1% fee, it’s 60% difference over the lifetime of your asset.
So if you have a billion dollars invested and you’re getting a 2% yield, you’re actually picking up $20 million a year. Instead of paying $10 million a year.
So the dynamic of the company is very important.
So you can imagine that if I don’t charge you a fee and if I have cheap leverage, the stock, the benefit accrues to the common stock shareholders.
Because I went and I borrowed $2.2 billion at 1.5% interest and I bought Bitcoin with it.
So what’s the logical theoretical yield of Bitcoin?
Is it more than 1.5% a year?
Well let's say it was 15% a year.
Then we’re scraping 14% positive real yield off of the debt.
And so that would be 14% of a billion dollars or more, actually 14% of $2.2 billion.
So that would be $300 million a year that accrues to the benefit of the common stock shareholders, you see.
This is the benefit of being an operating company. We can every quarter choose what to do.
So some quarters we would issue junk bonds, other quarters we would issue convertible bonds, other quarters we would sell the equity, other quarters we would just use our own cash.
So the answer is there’s always going to be a good market and there’s always going to be a bad market.
There’s things you shouldn’t do and there are things you should do.
So MSTR, to make a long story short, is a bit more complicated than a spot ETF, right?
If you want something plain vanilla and simple, that it should basically correlate 1 to 1 with Bitcoin, after you pay the fee.
Then you buy a Spot ETF.
But if you wanted to actually try to outperform Bitcoin like MSTR’s outperformed Bitcoin.
Our performance over the course of the three years is higher than bitcoin’s performance.
So if you want to outperform bitcoin or outperform the Spot ETF, you would do that by accretive financings.
Like for example, if our stock trades at 30% premium to the underlying assets, and we sell a billion dollars of equity, we actually capture $300 million of accretion to our shareholders." - Michael Saylor 💎