Yves Choueifaty – An Investment Thesis and Better Ways to Access the Opportunity

I am a mathematician and founder of Tobam, an asset management firm based in Paris, New York, and Dublin. At BTC Prague 2025, I shared why Bitcoin belongs in every portfolio — and why some of the most exciting ways to access it are still widely misunderstood.

Bitcoin Is Simpler Than You Think

Whenever I talk about Bitcoin, I start with a warning: Bitcoin is an extremely risky asset. That said, investing is fundamentally about taking risk — and risk is always a question of size. Investing $50,000 in Bitcoin is far less risky than buying $3 million worth of the S&P 500. Bitcoin belongs in every single portfolio. Depending on your risk appetite, you’ll hold more or less — but it belongs there.

Too often, when people introduce Bitcoin, they reach for words like “crypto” or “blockchain.” I think that’s a mistake. If I wanted to explain what a car is, I wouldn’t start with the laws of thermodynamics. Bitcoin can be understood through just five concepts: it is digital, it is secure and hard to forge, it is peer-to-peer, its governance is decentralized, and its supply is capped at 21 million. Those last two are what make Bitcoin unlike any currency before it.

The Conventional Ways to Access Bitcoin

We entered the Bitcoin space in 2013, initially as a mathematical curiosity. By 2016, we made a strong bet that major asset managers would eventually launch Bitcoin funds — and we launched the first open-ended fund invested in Bitcoin in the world. Until recently, our fund maintained a correlation of 0.999 to Bitcoin. Then, in May 2025, something changed: we began outperforming Bitcoin by over 1,100% in a single month.

A second conventional approach we identified around 2020 was investing in equities with significant Bitcoin correlation. Most global stocks have no meaningful correlation to Bitcoin, but a small population do. We built a fund around those — focused exclusively on Bitcoin-related companies. Our thesis was always that blockchain outside of Bitcoin holds little value, and that conviction explains our significant outperformance versus peers who diluted their exposure into broader blockchain plays.

A Better Way: Bitcoin Treasury Companies

We started investing in MicroStrategy in 2020. Over five years, while Bitcoin went up 10x, MicroStrategy went up 31x. Many dismissed this as a leverage story — but that’s an urban legend. With only $8 billion in debt against a $120 billion market cap, leverage barely explains the gap.

The real answer lies in what MicroStrategy calls Bitcoin yield — the increase in Bitcoin per share. In 2024, they grew Bitcoin per share by 74%. Year to date in 2025, that figure stands at 19%. As Michael Saylor puts it: the only thing better than Bitcoin is more Bitcoin.

We’ve now published research decomposing MicroStrategy’s performance into three precise mathematical factors. The same formula explains why, when Bitcoin rises 60%, MicroStrategy can rise 150%, MetaPlanet 15x, and The Blockchain Group 39x. We now monitor 60 such companies globally.

What We’ve Built

We organized this insight into funds that combine direct Bitcoin exposure with Bitcoin treasury company exposure — no leverage, no derivatives, daily liquidity. Since late April 2025, Bitcoin returned 24%. Our enhanced fund returned 131%. A second fund launched May 7th has returned 305% in just over a month.

The business model behind companies like MicroStrategy is, in fact, over 300 years old. The Bank of England and Banque de France did something structurally similar — raising capital to accumulate a reserve of value, then issuing tokens against it. I believe the future isn’t Bitcoin as currency. Bitcoin is the standard of value. The next currencies will be