Matt Levine, Columnist

Put the Crypto in the Index Funds

Also tariffs in credit agreements, JPMorgan private credit, Windsurf’s second exit and quants going to AI labs.

July 15, 2025 at 6:12 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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The basic situation is that the US stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of cryptocurrency. If a small public company has a $100 million pot of Bitcoin or Ethereum or Trumpcoin or what have you, its stock will be worth at least $200 million. This trade is baffling and magical; it was pioneered by MicroStrategy Inc. (which now calls itself Strategy, and which has about a $70 billion stash of Bitcoins and a $138 billion equity market capitalization1), and is now regularly and successfully imitated by all sorts of random small companies.

I make fun of this a lot, but it is worth asking what it means that the stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of crypto. There are in principle three sorts of answers: