“The idea of an index is it’s supposed to really represent faithfully the body of stocks that are in the universe,” said TD Cowen analyst Lance Vitanza, who has a “buy” rating on MicroStrategy. “Any large company that makes up a material portion of the Nasdaq universe should be reflected as being in the index.”
Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy checks all the boxes for inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 Index, a development that would trigger purchases of the shares by the US$451 billion worth of exchange-traded funds around the world that directly track the benchmark.
Yet market watchers are entertaining the possibility it gets snubbed in the index’s annual reshuffling on Friday for one simple reason: MicroStrategy has morphed into a levered bet on Bitcoin attached to a small software company that many say has no business being among the 100 most-important stocks on the Nasdaq.
