Wall Street finance executives who were thinking of plunging some of their company’s cash reserves into Bitcoin got a heat check this week.
Chief financial officers, not generally known as a risk-loving bunch, watched Bitcoin sink more than 25% in a 24-hour period last week. Burning a hole of that size in the corporate rainy day fund would amount to a career-ending wipeout at virtually any S&P 500 firm.
Yet the cryptocurrency’s 300% rally last year was hard to ignore, and a few companies dived in. MicroStrategy Inc. invested $425 million of its $500 million cash into Bitcoin. In October Square Inc., headed by longtime crypto advocate Jack Dorsey, announced that it converted about $50 million of its total assets as of the second quarter of 2020 into the token. Proselytizers like Bill Miller of Miller Value Partners said this was just the start of what was sure to be a trend across Main Street.
Now that Bitcoin’s famed volatility has reared again, the prospects that the cryptocurrency would become a regular part of corporate treasuries — never very good — look all but dead.
“It would be a red flag for investors if a corporation bought financial assets for speculation purposes unrelated to their core business,” said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading.
MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, among the first to put cash into the cryptocurrency, said in September that the Federal Reserve’s relaxing of its inflation policy helped convince him to invest the enterprise-software maker’s reserves.
In December, Saylor, an outspoken advocate of Bitcoin, plowed another $650 million of his company’s cash, raised through convertible senior notes, into the coin. That brought MicroStrategy’s holdings to approximately 70,470 Bitcoins, worth about $2.5 billion as of Friday.
Bitcoin’s recent pullback doesn’t seem to have derailed Saylor’s strategy. In a Twitter post Tuesday, he promoted his company’s “accelerated course in #Bitcoin strategy” webinar.
In December, Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk inquired about converting “large transactions” of the electric-car maker balance sheet into the coin. However, industry experts warn against the tactic.
“It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy,” said Robert Willens, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. “It might not be the greatest idea for a company to put most of its cash and cash items into an asset like that,” he said. “If Bitcoin preforms poorly, it’s not going to have enough to finance its working capital requirements.”