Good morning everyone, hopefully you are all having an excellent start to your week thus far. Thank you for joining me and welcome to Episode 2 of Season 2 brought to you by Magnelibra Trading & Research. This episode is entitled “Hedge Funds Arb MSTR Premium What's The Risk?”
Quick Disclaimer: The following podcast is for educational purposes only. This is not a solicitation to buy or sell commodity futures or options. The risk of trading securities, futures and options can be substantial and may not be appropriate for all listeners.
Ok guys, lets just jump right into the numbers first before we discuss what is going on with MicroStrategy. Let’s take a look at our MSTR tracker which is now back in positive territory after a nice 2 day rip higher:
So far since we have been keeping track overall the strategy is +12.68% as of yesterday, with virtually all of those gains coming from the option premium selling which accounts for a positive 13% while the equity portion is down marginally (0.32%).
So for now with the recent $100 run up off the lows for MSTR the strategy is back into the black. So let’s move now to discuss what may be driving the price of the stock higher. We know there are a few hedge funds out there looking to arbitrage the premium that MicroStrategy has created via its Bitcoin for Equity swap and we showed you guys that premium in a prior post, that premium today sits at 2.04x.
So for a simple quick tutorial on this premium, let’s use $1000 invested to compare the values, first Bitcoin:
$1000 / $101850 = 0.00982, now for MicroStrategy stock, $1000 / $379.09 = 2.6379 and for every 1 share of MicroStrategy it represents 0.00182 of a bitcoin which is calculated from their total Bitcoin owned vs their total shares outstanding (TOS). So we have to take our 2.6379 shares of MSTR and multiply by that 0.00182 which gives us 0.00480. Here is the BTC/MSTR ratio chart:
So we have:
BTC at 0.00982 and MSTR at 0.00480 which gives us 0.00982 / 0.00480 = 2.046
2.046x, this is the PREMIUM that the Hedge Funds are trying to arbitrage down because in the long run they feel that the more Saylor executes his plan the more stock that he will issue, the more dilution and the greater the value that Bitcoin overall should obtain vis a vis.
Now as a long time arb, we know one very important thing, that is the markets can stay irrational a lot longer than you can stay solvent. Thus we would suspect massive levered short positions in MSTR will get blown out some times because of the asymmetry that exists both between the players in MSTR and in the Bitcoin market itself. Things are not always black and white, in fact in the high stakes game of hedge fund arb, lets just say there is always a bigger player looking to fry you and has a much large balance sheet than you do. Predatory Hedge Funds look for opportunities like this to exploit and the circle of these funds is very small, meaning someone always knows someone…money likes to talk, especially dumb money!
So with that said, we suspect we will see volatile up moves in this stock from time to time and its what makes this MicroStrategy gamma game so intriguing, but certainly not for the faint of heart.
Anyway keep an eye on this and we are certain CNBC will continue their coverage of this as it increases ratings, but thankfully you listen in here at Magnelibra and can follow and understand what is truly going on under the hood.
So we hope you continue to follow us so that you can inform all your colleagues who pretend to know what’s going on, but truly might not know why it is going on!
Ok lets move over to yesterday’s settlements where the Dax, Nat Gas, Bitcoin and Nasdaq were the days big winner and the RBOB the little loser:
As far as the rolling changes, Bitcoin leading the weekly change but on the 30 day Nat Gas is the standout with the Dow and Ultra Bond futures the big losers:
As far as our Magnelibra CTA Markets Sentiment Tracker we consolidated this so that the positions are both reflected as a long, short or neutral and that you see the changes from the prior day listed in the top right hand corner:
As far as the MEGA8s the group almost pushed to prior highs in regards to total market cap gaining $367Bn yesterday to $19.365Tn. META was the big winner on the day +4.23%. As far as the hedge this week we will still target that QQQ 530C at $3 or greater if it can get up there:
Here is the longer term chart of the group:
Ok that is it for today, we did want to include this SP500 vs Gold annualized chart as our final numbers for 2024 are in. For those that think Gold is a relic of monetary past, well, not so much as the annualized over the last 25 years from our data shows Gold outperforming:
So that is more data for you to increase your investor intelligence and its why we here at Magnelibra strive to educate you not on NARRATIVE, but on the data and what it actually shows and presents. Yea investing or hoarding Gold may not be fancy, may not be the talk of the party, but it sure presents a hell of a statistical long run case to do so! Anyway hope you got something out of today’s episode and as always, please subscribe and try to support our work, if you are a crypto investor and want to support that way our BTC address is included below and no Magnelibra does not care about anonymity and on-chain analysis tracking of our addresses, not yet at least! We know the future is decentralized, we know the future is trustless systems and we have been a part of this movement for quite some time. In fact, was looking back to some of our earliest BTC transactions back in 2013 and boy or boy did we learn a thing or two! Back then nobody knew about it and I was doing arbitrage on multiple sites, but Mt Gox took everything away in 2014! Lessons learned for sure, but faith never wavered! This is why you can’t look at anything in too short a time frame, instead of hours and days, its years and decades sometimes…but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn a thing or two a long the way! Till next time…cheers.
BTC ADDRESS: 3DvDvPnjwu5Fd6sagAYmiFXA2fPkjJf2cp
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