Bitcoin Stocks Near NAV: Why Company Execs Are Sweating Bullets—And Should Be 😬

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It was one of those heavy summer mornings, air thick with portent, when Matthew Sigel, genius—though embattled—of VanEck, took once more to the public stage, or, as the peasantry now calls it, X. In a tone equal parts Cassandra and weary bookkeeper, he implored those trusted with the sacred hoard of Bitcoin to, perhaps for the first time in human history, not squander it with wild abandon.

“Must we perpetually issue shares like bored aristocrats tossing coins to the rabble?” Sigel seemed to sigh, scratching his metaphysical beard. For even technology cannot escape this immutable law: divide your spoils too finely, and soon the rescue becomes the ransacking—even the serfs know this.

He issued his prophecy: should a company’s stock hover at or just above its net asset value—NAV, that ghostly number dividing their crypto-purse by hungry shareholders—then let the presses still. Cease, halt, desist, he entreated, lest the lust for short-term lucre birth a dilution so severe it would leave even the ghosts of finance shaking their heads in disbelief.

“No public BTC treasury company has traded below its Bitcoin NAV for a sustained period.

But at least one is now approaching parity.

As some of these companies raise capital through large at-the-market (ATM) programs to buy BTC, a risk is emerging: If the stock trades at or near…

— matthew sigel, recovering CFA (@matthew_sigel) June 16, 2025

He declared—though with a certain rye-bread dryness—that the ancient art of “buybacks” ought to take precedence, especially when Bitcoin soars and stock prices suffer from an unexplained lassitude, perhaps from too much borscht. If the discount remains, start a “strategic review,” which for those uninitiated, means a lot of walking through gloomy hallways, muttering, “What now?” 🤔

Sigel, that wily sage, even suggested that executive rewards should rest not on the sheer expanse of one’s Bitcoin heap, but upon the alchemical achievement of NET ASSET VALUE PER SHARE. “Once you are trading at NAV, shareholder dilution is no longer strategic. It is extractive,” he warned—not so much with fire as with the sigh of a man who has seen too many spreadsheets.

Meanwhile, the bureaucrats themselves churned out yet another report (June 2025, for what it matters), announcing to startled cows and mild-mannered portfolio managers that 61 public entities now clutch collectively 673,897 BTC—like a Tolstoyan family hoarding samovars. Of these, a princely 58 trade above “mNAV,” a metric which confirms, for those of us still awake, that investors still delight in overpaying for Bitcoin adjacent memorabilia.

A brief lesson for the peasants: mNAV above 1.0 means company shares cost more than the actual gold (Bitcoin) in their coffers. mNAV below 1.0? They’re trading cheaper than a Turgenev novella in a secondhand Moscow kiosk.

Strategy—ever the overachiever—remains the reigning czar, lording over its 582,000 Bitcoin, mNAV at 1.91, and hoarding like an elderly aunt with too many cats. A recent binge saw them scoop up 74,000 more coin and issue preferred stock worth $250 million. “Why buy less if you can always buy more, and then send a polite note to shareholders apologizing?”—their unofficial motto.

Not everyone shares in the jubilation. Semler Scientific and Trump Media & Technology Group, those tragic Chekhovian uncle-figures, languish with equity premiums to NAV at -10% and -16%. One imagines them brooding on a terrace, staring into the middle distance, asking the eternal Russian question: “To issue or not to issue?”

Such are the times, dear reader. Sit and watch—preferably with vodka handy—as the dance of dilution continues, perpetually on the knife edge of profit and calamity. 🥃🐻

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2025-06-16 11:09