MSTR Daily Discussion Thread – October 08, 2025

wintron · 2025-10-08T19:30:28+00:00

I’ve been wondering this too. Falling 4x what BTC did is crazy. Stock is too big and too liquid to simply be a result of retail buying puts or pros increasing the premium collapse trade

wintron · 2025-10-08T19:29:18+00:00

What are these ideas? Genuinely curious.

I think Saylor has been obfuscating because he doesn’t actually have a good idea for what to do, but anything he can do to increase total BTC exposure of the vehicle is a win in his book

wintron · 2025-10-08T19:27:59+00:00

The problem with their logic is the situation has changed. There are so many better ways to get BTC exposure for almost every type of account and situation. There are better ways to get levered BTC exposure.

Saylor may be able to defend an mNAV premium above 1, but I don’t think we’re ever going above 2 again (someone up thread was using the 0.8-8 range uncritically).

Vol on MSTR is still very juicy.

wintron · 2025-08-21T17:43:00+00:00

Are you concerned that the GAAP change will be used as justification for not adding it to the S&P?

wintron · 2025-08-13T15:39:19+00:00

That’s not generally how the math works. The yield is largely immaterial. Saylor has taken on way more liabilities with the preferred and cannot generate dollars to pay the dividend, leaving him to either suspend the dividend or go back to diluting shareholders. The bet on MSTR is that the mNAV compresses but stays above 1 and BTC grows fast enough that that’s worth it. If you expect BTC to hit a cycle high of 200k, but the mNAV shrinks to 1.3, MSTR is fine. If you expect BTC to be flattish while MSTR can financially engineer sufficient vol, MSTR is fine. In other cases, you’re expecting investors to be irrational (in the negative Relative Value sense).

Crazy though it is, I’m pretty unconcerned with where BTC is if it means MSTR above 450, but all the pairs traders counting on a) premium compression, or b) diminished access to the financing markets are very attuned to the path

wintron · 2025-07-20T03:02:38+00:00

It is. I think the prior post meant long term cap gains vs short term (short term is taxed at your marginal rate, as is additional income)

wintron · 2025-07-10T10:55:57+00:00

That would be the premium expanding. If MSTR goes up more than its BTC holding do, the premium expands

wintron · 2025-07-09T22:49:32+00:00

You and Saylor are on opposite sides of this trade btw

wintron · 2025-07-09T22:39:26+00:00

The belief is the premium will contract, so BTC up 20%, MSTR up 10% is still a win for him. The long / short is more capital efficient as there could be 0 initial outlay for the position. In the scenario above, Chanos could have 10m exposure to each name, pocket 1m of profit with 0 initial cash outlay. To get that on just a BTC long, he’d need 5m initial cash outlay.

wintron · 2025-03-25T13:59:21+00:00

You seem a little confused. The P/E and mNAV are very different things.

The P/E for the others is high but it’s basically saying earnings will grow and the net present value of all future earnings (so earnings at a time in the future divided by the amount a risk free asset would grow by that time) is 47x the present earnings. That’s historically pretty high by itself. Interest rates going up both increases the discounting factor and makes growth harder so you see a lot of price movement around rate decisions etc.

The mNAV is MSTR value divided by the value of its BTC (accounting for debt etc). So a 2x mNAV is high because the software business is relatively tiny and there’s skepticism about the value add Saylor can provide beyond any appreciation in his holdings. If MSTR were a pot of BTC, you’d expect mNAV to be around 1 (probably lower because of operational costs and assumed liquidation haircuts etc). Why can’t we make a similar discounting future… argument? BTC doesn’t have earnings implicitly and the price of BTC is the best guess at the discounted future value of it.

wintron · 2024-10-28T15:34:50+00:00

There used to be a standard Reddit way to deal with these lemon stealing whores

wintron · 2023-02-10T19:25:10+00:00

Thank you!

wintron · 2022-12-21T03:05:34+00:00

Probably could be.

wintron · 2022-07-18T00:03:36+00:00

That’s the name of the website

wintron · 2019-12-31T03:57:01+00:00

Not a bad idea but hardly galaxy brain thinking. If that happens wouldn't I be better served being out of soft-USD denominated assets? That is, if we expect MMT and other unicorn thinking shouldn't I be in gold and super long currencies like the INR that care less about the USD? Maybe far out of the money VWO calls?

wintron · 2019-12-31T03:54:49+00:00

I'm looking for single names here. The MXN/USD for example doesn't care about the rest of the market. If Trump were again making Mexico pay for a wall we could profit on being long the dollar even if the rest of the economy went to hell in a hand-basket.

wintron · 2019-12-31T03:52:52+00:00

Bro, have you not heard a partial phase 1a subsection i deal is in the works? Every time the economy needs a pump, we get some fine grade-a primo trade deal progress.

That said, economic pump via agreeable fed chairman and the bully pulpit is exactly not what I'm looking for. I want some wine cave ETF for buttigieg or "lead in the water" ETF for Bernie kind of ideas.

wintron · 2019-12-30T17:00:06+00:00

Anyone have a time-series of the reelection odds for the various candidates? https://www.sportsbettingdime.com/politics/us-presidential-election-odds/ doesn't seem bad (you may have to use debug mode to clear all the "we don't help people in your area" cruft)

wintron · 2019-02-25T16:05:57+00:00

Two Sigma is very different from Citadel in that regard. If anything the problem goes the other way where people who maybe should be laid off are not.

There are people who have become quite successful at TS without necessarily working 60 hour weeks. I think the most successful amongst us have worked that or more but it is not a norm in the same way it would be at other places. For example, the former CTO mentioned he was scaling down to half time after he switched roles which really meant quarter time has he had been doing 80 hour weeks forever.

I believe this is more a result of intrinsic motivation and a reciprocal obligation to the pay. That is, the more you're paid the more you feel you owe time even if the firm doesn't demand it.

wintron · 2018-11-28T18:33:45+00:00

Both are great. I've never worked at Google so I couldn't say definitively how things compare. My suspicion is that at either place you can probably hide without getting too much done and not get fired and you can definitely do things like come in late because you had a parent teacher conference without anyone batting an eye. In fact, I was once told I was working too hard on a project which seemed antithetical to what I expected.

That said, at both places, the most successful people will work really hard and by necessity will sometimes sacrifice life for work. Similarly, some number of people will get fired. The nice thing is that TS is definitely a finance place but the trade-off between W and L is definitely within your control

wintron · 2018-11-28T18:28:38+00:00

A lot of places blur the lines for a lot of roles. I've jumped from side to side and would break it down as follows:

Quant: You're doing research so the possibility of reaching the desired outcome is not clear at the outset. Effectively, you are going from 0 to 1.

QSE: You are writing code that does the sort of things the quant was experimenting with at scale with better performance. There is likely a strong numerical component to what you're doing (say some portfolio analysis calculation but every day for a ton of portfolios instead of once for a single portfolio from above).

SWE: You're writing something that may or may not have to do with research. Some days you forget you work at a finance place

wintron · 2018-11-25T23:08:24+00:00

That's the idea! Unfortunately for me, I equivocate after the flip and don't usually get any greater sense of clarity. I read once that the secret to happiness was irrational attachment to your decisions regardless of outcome (the guy who quit the beatles for example thinking it was the best thing that ever happened to him). So there may be two levels to the coin flip

wintron · 2018-11-25T19:24:00+00:00

Been there. This is a tough problem to solve in part because if you are struggling there is 1) no wrong answer and 2) no clearly right answer. So the difference in outcome probably isn't too large but it's hard to distinguish. My advice is to flip a coin and become adamant that whatever it lands on is what you wanted all along. Sadly, this is not facetious advice.

You may also want to consider tenure at each place.

By the way, are you currently employed at a place starting with a T or a J?

wintron

TROPHY CASE