Every investor in the world is about to gain bitcoin exposure

Investors the world over are about to wake up with bitcoin in their portfolios.

Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy—the 35-year-old software company that’s staked its balance sheet and reputation on bitcoin—is set to join the Nasdaq 100 as part of the index’s annual reconstitution, according to an announcement Friday. 

The move takes effect December 23 and marks another milestone for Saylor and his shareholders, who have enjoyed a roughly 500 percent return in 2024. 

That’s more than triple bitcoin’s year-to-date return of about 135 percent.

The Nasdaq 100, which trades under the ticker QQQ, includes $325 billion in assets and is a popular option for set-and-forget automatic investments. 

“Very few people realize that this moment is bitcoin entering the Nasdaq in the MSTR wrapper, similar to bitcoin entering the spot ETF market through a BlackRock wrapper in January,” investor Tim Kotzman, who hosts the Bitcoin Treasuries podcast, told me.

From the end of 2022 to December 2023, MicroStrategy’s market cap increased 546 percent, as the chart below shows. Then over the past 12 months, it jumped 873 percent to hit a record $102 billion.

“To see a company jump from a $10 billion market cap [at the end of 2023] to $100 billion in such a short span of time and now qualify and be included in one of the biggest indexes in the world is quite a testament to its legitimacy and relevance overall,” said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets.

MicroStrategy critics often compare the company to a Ponzi scheme, while bullish supporters describe it as innovative. 

In any case, Ben Werkman, an equity analyst and the founder of NumerisX, a consulting firm that specializes in bitcoin treasury advising, told me the Nasdaq inclusion should give other companies more confidence to explore adding bitcoin on their balance sheets. At the same time, it raises MicroStrategy’s credibility across important corners of the market.

“It’s going to help MicroStrategy from a credit perspective with rating agencies,” Werkman said. “[A Nasdaq inclusion] changes how the market perceives you as an organization and it gives you better access to capital and a lower cost to any of the debt you bring in.”

Saylor, for his part, has spearheaded the company’s transformation into what’s effectively a leveraged bitcoin proxy. As of December, MicroStrategy owns 423,650 bitcoins. 

At the asset’s current price of about $103,000, the stash is worth more than $43.6 billion. 

Notably, passive index fund investors will be buying MicroStrategy no matter the price, Kotzman added, which will likely make the stock increasingly attractive and allow the company to continue acquiring more bitcoin.

Palantir and Axon Enterprise will also join the heavily traded Nasdaq 100. Meanwhile, three companies got the boot: Super Micro Computer, Moderna, and Illumina.

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