Harvard University’s $56.9 billion endowment made its first foray into ether last quarter, even as it scaled back its exposure to bitcoin .
According to an SEC filing, the Harvard Management Company (HMC) bought almost 3.9 million shares of BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA), valued at around $86.8 million.
The company also reduced its stake in the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) by 21%, selling roughly 1.5 million shares. The bitcoin exchange-traded fund remains Harvard’s largest publicly disclosed holding at $265.8 million.
The shift comes after the price of bitcoin dropped from an all-time high of around $125,000 in October to close the quarter just below $90,000.
The move, however, may have less to do with sentiment and more to do with market dynamics, according to Andy Constan, founder and chief investment officer at Damped Spring Advisors.
The sale could reflect the unwinding of a trade that meant to capitalize on bitcoin treasury companies trading at premiums to the value of their BTC holdings, as measured by the multiple of net asset value, or mNAV, which compares enterprise value to bitcoin value.
When bitcoin’s price was booming, digital asset treasury (DAT) firms like Strategy (MSTR) traded at high premiums to the value of the bitcoin in their treasuries. MSTR, for example, at one point traded near 2.9 mNAV, meaning investors buying the shares were paying around $2.9 to own $1 of BTC.
That premium reflects not only the underlying cash-generating business, but also the company’s potential to keep accumulating bitcoin. Still, various investors bet on that mNAV gap narrowing. They held bitcoin indirectly through IBIT and shorted the shares of Strategy and similar digital asset treasury (DAT) companies.
Then the unwind took place, according to Constan. As the price of bitcoin plunged, so did that of DAT shares. Strategy, for example, now trades at 1.2 mNAV. These traders may also be rebalancing their portfolios, as bitcoin’s price nearly doubled last year despite the drawdown, suggesting it could be above the institution’s desired portfolio allocation, he wrote on X.
Data from 13F filings with the SEC gathered by Todd Schneider at 13.info backs these points. It shows that institutions reported owning 230 million IBIT shares in the fourth quarter, down from 417 million in the third.
Harvard also boosted investments in chipmakers Broadcom and TSMC, as well as in Google’s parent company Alphabet and railroad operator Union Pacific, while trimming stakes in Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia.