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Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCMKTS:GBTC) Should Rebalance In Line With Bitcoin Near Term

Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCMKTS:GBTC) Should Rebalance In Line With Bitcoin Near Term
Written by
Chris Sandburg
Published on
October 26, 2017
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Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCMKTS:GBTC) is up just shy of 500% year to date and around 400% over the last six months.Right now, however, it's trading around 35% off highs recorded at the start of September.This decline has come against a backdrop of the price of bitcoin increasing dramatically, with the latter reaching all-time highs in and around $6,200 just a few days ago. GBTC Daily ChartBitcoin Investment Trust is an ETN that seeks to reflect the price of bitcoin and, in turn, to offer traders and investors that want to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency space but that don't want to buy and store bitcoin a method of doing just that. As such, it would make sense that the stock would rise when the price of bitcoin rises.This hasn’t happened recently, meaning there could be an opportunity to jump in at depressed prices ahead of a recovery towards a more balanced reflection of the underlying fundamentals.So why the lag in response?The company filed for registration on the NYSEARCA earlier this year by way of a Rule 19b-4 application but subsequently withdrew the application at the end of last month. The reason for the withdrawal was that two similar applications had been turned down and management believed that there hadn’t been enough regulatory developments in the space to prompt the SEC to approve a similar application after it had shot down two previous efforts.When Bitcoin Investment Trust announced this news, the company took a hit as markets interpreted it as a negative development. At the time, we published our thoughts, highlighting the fact that the withdrawal didn’t really mean anything and that the market sell-off could an opportunity to pick up some cheap shares.An almost exactly the same situation has materialized over the last twenty-four hours, but this time as relates to an S1 that the company filed back in January. The withdrawal of the Rule 19b-4 meant that the S1 wasn’t really relevant anymore and – in turn – the company decided to pull it and wait for a later date to get things moving.Again, then, this isn’t a big deal, but markets are interpreting it that way.There's another element to our argument here as well – this stock is trading at an around 20% premium to its NAV. That's far lower than the more than 100% premium we saw at the start of last month. It's also under representative (we feel) of the benefit that the ETN offers traders and investors – as outlined above, the removal of pretty much all of the barriers to entry in this sector.It also doesn’t take into account the fact that bitcoin is projected to continue to rise in price both near and long term. Fundstrat's Thomas Lee just reported in Bloomberg that he expects bitcoin to rise to $25,000 over the next five years and that, in line with this rise, shares of Bitcoin Investment Trust could be worth more than $2,600 a piece. That's a close to 300% premium on current prices.As we've said on a couple of occasions in the past, when it comes to companies in this space right now, volatility should be expected. Price is moving fast and this is translating to sentiment shifting all over the place, which in turn is translating to some roller coaster action in these bitcoin and blockchain stocks.With that said, however, and based purely on the fact that Bitcoin Investment Trust isn’t pricing itself in line with the underlying price of bitcoin and – in turn – the potential for a rebalancing on this discrepancy, we think it could be well worth a punt for anyone that's willing to absorb a bit of volatility risk.Check out our previous coverage of this one here. We will be updating our subscribers as soon as we know more. For the latest updates on GBTC, sign up below!Image courtesy of BTC Keychain via FlickrDisclosure: We have no position in GBTC and have not been compensated for this article.

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