(Bloomberg) -- MicroStrategy Inc., a company best-known for accumulating a roughly $13 billion hoard of Bitcoin, will be included in a key global equity index following a rally in the firm's shares that outpaced the digital asset.
The Tysons Corner, Virginia-based enterprise software maker is one of the three largest additions to the MSCI World Index based on market capitalization, MSCI Inc. said in a statement on Tuesday. Index providers regularly review their gauges and the latest changes take effect at the end of the month.
The shift is an indication of how crypto exposure can increasingly creep into traditional portfolios, given that many billions of dollars track or are benchmarked against MSCI's world gauge. Other such avenues include new US and Hong Kong exchange-traded funds that directly hold digital assets and which over time may attract the interest of products such as multi-asset funds.
MicroStrategy's co-founder Michael Saylor is a prominent Bitcoin advocate. In the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, he decided to invest some of the company's cash into the original cryptocurrency. The firm held 214,400 Bitcoin as of April 26.
Shares in MicroStrategy have more than quadrupled over the past year, beating a surge of almost 130% in Bitcoin amid a recovery in crypto from a 2022 rout. The company is viewed as a proxy for exposure to the token but that role has come into question in the wake of the January debut of US Bitcoin ETFs.
In March, Kerrisdale Capital Management LLC said it's shorting the stock since it was outpacing the surge in the digital asset's price. MicroStrategy has four analyst buy ratings with an average 12-month price target of $1,678.75 — almost 30% above the stock's current level, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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