In case you missed it, there were two pretty big news items in the world of bitcoin last week that should have gotten coverage in financially inclined mainstream news outlets; Microsoft has a proposed board resolution about whether or not they should assess bitcoin as an investment and Emory University disclosed a $15.8m position in the Grayscale Mini Bitcoin Trust. Taken at face value, these are two massive validations of bitcoin as a legitimate asset in the eyes of institutions.

Let's walk through them.

On December 10th of this year, Microsoft will hold a shareholder meeting that will bring with it resolutions on the proposals above. One of which is an "Assessment of Investing in Bitcoin". This is pretty wild to see on the docket for the checks notes second largest company in the world by market cap. It seems that this is the first case of a bitcoin activist investor emerging in the wild because this proposal is only on the agenda because a large shareholder decided to force the issue and put it on the agenda.

The Microsoft board is recommending that shareholders vote against this proposal. Their reasoning for this recommendation is that treasury management is always top of mind for the multi-trillion dollar behemoth and it would be silly (and likely insulting) to force them to assess bitcoin. It may not come as a surprise to you, but your Uncle Marty thinks this is a bad idea. Companies like Microsoft, especially Microsoft considering how much it has to lose, should be taking bitcoin as a strategic treasury asset very seriously.

Historically, shareholders have very rarely voted against the recommendations of the board of directors, so it would be surprising to see this particular proposal pass at the meeting in six weeks. Even though this will be disappointing, I think the signal with this story is the fact that bitcoin activist investors exist. This particular proposal was put forth by the National Center for Public Policy Research and highlights the relative ease with which minority shareholders can force the issue of bitcoin within the board rooms of publicly traded companies.

Even though this proposal is unlikely to pass, it will now forever be marked as the moment in time Microsoft was forced to consciously push off their inevitable accumulation of bitcoin as a treasury asset on their balance sheet. The board could play dumb up to this point. Simply state that their priorities lied elsewhere like leaning into the AI boom, expanding their cloud services, and engineering new ways to waste people's time with their Teams product. Not anymore. Now that the proposal is on the agenda they have to acknowledge that they were aware of bitcoin's potential as a treasury reserve asset in 2024 and decided it wasn't a good idea to store a portion of their shareholders' capital in it.

Never say never though. Maybe their shareholders will surprise the world and force the issue.

The news out of Emory University is just as profound.

University endowments are one of the largest pools of actively managed capital in the United States. As of 2023, university endowments in the United States managed ~$840B. Endowments are tasked with investing money and producing returns, which enable universities to re-invest in their facilities, hire staff, and provide scholarships to their student base. Among many other things. To achieve these goals endowments are forced to invest with a focus on the long-term. How can the CIOs sitting at endowments ensure that their university will be able to achieve its funding goals decades into the future?

It shouldn't be a shock that endowments would allocate to bitcoin. Bitcoin is the perfect asset for an investor focused on the long-term. It is a perfectly scarce digital asset riding the long-term secular tailwinds of the digitization of our everyday lives and the accelerating debasement of fiat monetary currencies and sovereign debt markets. It would be pretty embarrassing for those managing the capital of endowments to miss out on a once in a millennia long-term asset like bitcoin. Kudos to Emory for recognizing this and dipping their toe in the water. Emory University's endowment manages $10.24B, so this allocation to the Grayscale bitcoin ETF only represents 0.15% of their assets.

With all of this in mind, our friend MacroScope makes a very astute observation; it is very odd that many in the mainstream financial press did not cover these news items after they hit the ticker. You'd think that this would be pertinent information for an individual or organization that operates in the world of finance. Inflation fears are reemerging, the yield curve is reacting counterintuitively against the Fed's recent rate cuts, geopolitical tensions are on the rise and an asset that enables anyone to escape that madness is being adopted by some of the most respected asset managers in finance and seriously considered as a treasury asset on the balance sheet of the second largest company in the world. Might be important to make people aware of these facts.

Don't worry, freaks. We'll make sure to keep you abreast of these developments as they manifest if the mainstream corporate press refuses to do so and we'll keep doing it when they wise up.

Maybe they are just sleeping at the wheel. They wouldn't be the only one's to be doing that at a moment. Here's an interesting stat about today's revisit to $71,000:

We are s0 early.

Final thought...

It's fun watching your children bloom into creative individuals.