During an interview on Wednesday (June 15), Michael J. Saylor, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Nasdaq-listed business intelligence company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR), talked about investing in Bitcoin.
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.”
Yesterday (June 15), Saylor talked about Bitcoin — at a time when it 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.“
On May 27, the MicroStrategy CEO confirmed that he remains as bullish as ever on Bitcoin during an interview on Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight”.
Saylor said:
“Bitcoin is the most certain thing in a very uncertain world. In a market full of chaos and sound and fury, people need a safe place to stand apart from the intervention of a government, an agency, or corporation.
“So, Bitcoin represents a fair, open, equitable network with a very simple promise to anyone that wants to join, which is what you own is yours and no one’s going to take it away from you…
“In these markets right now, there’s no simple place to hide. All the indexes are in bear market territory. Bonds don’t represent a safe refuse because they’re currency derivatives. Stocks have to grow their cash flows faster than the inflation rate.
“But if you zoom out, two years since the beginning of the covet crisis, you notice the US money supply expanded 36%. Gold is up 7%. The S&P index is up 29%. The Nasdaq only up 19%. Bitcoin is up 229%. So, if you can stomach the volatility, you take the long view, you’ve got a safe haven there…
“Whenever I have some spare cash, we buy more Bitcoin. We’re taking a very very long view toward this. The network’s only getting better. Adoption is improving. Very constructive regulation is coming out of DC, and the Lightning Network is moving us closer to Satoshi’s promise of letting everybody in the world trade with each other at the speed of light in a fair and equitable fashion… I’ll be buying at the top forever… Bitcoin is an instrument of economic empowerment.“
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Featured Image by “geralt” via Unsplash
