Vanguard Slams Bitcoin—But Now Has Billions Tied To It Thanks To Index Exposure
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In a twist of fate, Vanguard has become the largest shareholder of the most established Bitcoin equity play.
The $10 trillion asset manager has famously refused to touch Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies while its peers have jumped headfirst in the past year.
Now Vanguard is the largest shareholder in MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR), a firm whose value proposition is that it is the most established Bitcoin proxy in the stock market, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
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Vanguard owns more than 20 million shares of all of MicroStrategy’s outstanding class A shares, worth over $9 billion, the report said. Bloomberg said that the firm likely surpassed Capital Group in Q4 2024 to claim the top spot among the firm’s shareholders. In comparison, MicroStrategy Chair Michael Saylor owns just under 20 million shares, according to an April company filing.
The disconnect between Vanguard’s professed cryptocurrency stance and its financial holdings primarily comes from its passive index fund strategies through funds like the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (NASDAQ:VITSX), Vanguard Extended Market Index (NASDAQ:VIEIX) and the Vanguard Growth Index Fund ETF (NYSE:VUG).
But Vanguard also has exposure to MicroStrategy in some of its actively managed funds. Still, the firm maintains that this is not the result of conviction but the fact that those funds are comprised of stocks chosen by mathematical models.
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“God has a sense of humor,” Bloomberg Senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas told Bloomberg. “Vanguard chose this life. When you have an index fund, you have to own all the stocks, for better or worse, and that includes stocks that you may not like or approve of personally.”
NovaDius Wealth Management President Nate Geracisaid Tuesday on X, “if you don’t see the irony here, I don’t know what to tell you.”
Meanwhile, VanEck Head of Digital Assets Research Matthew Sigelsaid, “Indexing into $9B of what you openly mock isn’t strategy. It’s institutional dementia.”
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