On Wednesday (June 22), Michael J. Saylor, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Nasdaq-listed business intelligence company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR), shared his thoughts about the crypto space in general and Bitcoin in particular.
It is worth remembering that on 11 August 2020, MicroStrategy announced via a press release that it had “purchased 21,454 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $250 million” to use as a “primary treasury reserve asset.”
Saylor said at the time:
“Our decision to invest in Bitcoin at this time was driven in part by a confluence of macro factors affecting the economic and business landscape that we believe is creating long-term risks for our corporate treasury program ― risks that should be addressed proactively.“
Since then MicroStrategy has continued to accumulate Bitcoin and its CEO has become one of Bitcoin’s most vocal advocates. MicroStrategy’s latest $BTC purchase, which Saylor tweeted about on April 5, means that the firm is now HODLing around 129,218 bitcoins, which were “acquired for ~$3.97 billion at an average price of ~$30,700 per bitcoin.”
Saylor’s most recent comment about Bitcoin were made during a conversation yesterday with CNN International anchor and correspondent Julia Chatterley.
Chatterly started by asking Saylor if Bitcoin could go bust.
Saylor replied:
“We’re in here for the long term. Bitcoin is going to outlast all of us. I’m quite sure of that.“
She then asked if Bitcoin needs the crypto space to get regulated to start going up again.
Saylor answered:
“Yeah, I think it’s It’s clear that the people are confused, and regulation will be constructive because clarity will help the market mature. The people are confused about what’s a currency, what’s a commodity, what’s a security, what are tokens.
“There’s 19,000 cryptos out there. I think we can see in the crypto crash that the average investor’s been taken advantage of by traders and by wildcat crypto banks and as the regulators come in and they clear up this confusion and they introduce rules of the road, it’s going to be good for mainstream investors.
“It’s going to be good for corporations. It will catapult the industry from the entrepreneurial offshore anything goes stage into into an institutional mature asset class.“
Chatterly then wanted to know whether it is too high risk at the moment for retail investors to invest in the crypto market.
Saylor told her:
“Well, I think the challenge is if you wait for a decade for everything to be cleared up, the price of Bitcoin is going to be 10 or 100 X more than this right now. So, you have to choose whether or not you want to enter knowing that there are about a dozen things that are going to mature the asset class and make it more transparent or whether you want to wait for all those things to take place and then pay a much higher price when it does.“
On June 15, the MicroStrategy CEO talked about Bitcoin during an interview with David Faber and Carl Quintanilla, two of the co-anchors of CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street“, and Senior Markets Commentator Michael Santoli.
Faber started by asking the MicroStrategy CEO how he feels about MicroStrategy’s nearly $4 billion investment in $BTC given the current bear market (which has seen $BTC drop to as low as $20,116 from the all-time high of around $69,044, which it reached on 10 November 2021).
Saylor replied:
“I think it’s been a net positive. We back-tested our strategy against every other alternative. If you roll the clock back to August 10th of 2020, when we embarked on this journey, Bitcoin’s performed 10x better than anything else. Gold’s down 10%. Nasdaq is flat. Bitcoin is up 86% since that time. Over any timeframe, two years, four years, eight years, Bitcoin’s the best performing asset. I can’t come up with a better idea...
“If you think about Bitcoin, if your time horizon is one month, it looks like a volatile risk asse, but if your time horizon is 10 years, it looks like a risk-off store of value asset. So, the crossover point is four years. Nobody’s ever lost money investing in Bitcoin for four years.
“And if you want to surrogate a the book value of the Bitcoin network, it would be the four-year simple moving average. The simple moving average of Bitcoin over four years is about $21,685. Bitcoin has only touched that that point a couple of times in its history, and those always been great buying opportunities.“
Santoli asked what Saylor tells those people who bought Bitcoin on margin after listening to Saylor and are now finding themselves “in a deeply negative position.”
Saylor replied:
“Look,if your time horizon is less than four years, you’re a trader, and I don’t think you should trade anything unless you’re a professional, you do it for a living. If your timer horrizon is more than four years, you can reasonably call yourself an investor, and the Bitcoin savers or maximalists have a time horizon of 10 years or longer.
“So, my advice to anybody investing at Bitcoin is, unless you’re a professional high-speed trader with proprietary software, you ought to hold it for at least four years, and if you want to focus on something, focus upon the four-year,simple moving average. It’ll keep you from giving yourself anxiety, and that helps you to understand where we are in the lifecycle of the asset.“
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Featured Image by “geralt” via Pixabay.com
