I'm Sorry, You Already Own Bitcoin

When I started this blog about finance, I promised myself I would stay as far away from crypto as I possibly could. It’s a wildly opinionated topic, it’s delicate, and for some inexplicable reason it turns every conversation into a small war. So let me be clear up front: this post is not really about crypto. It’s about passively managed index funds — the boring, sensible things a huge number of us hold for retirement.

In fact, a fairer title would have been “I’m sorry, you’re already exposed to the price of Bitcoin” — but that didn’t sound quite as catchy :D So bear with me until the end, and you’ll understand exactly how and why.

A quick refresher on passive funds

We’ve talked about passive investing a few times on this blog already (it’s the quiet backbone of the long-term strategies I compared here), but let’s do a fast refresher, because the dynamics matter a lot for this post.

A passively managed fund doesn’t try to pick winners. Instead, it simply buys everything in a given list — an index — in the right proportions, and then sits there. The most famous example is a fund that tracks the S&P 500: buy it, and you own a tiny slice of America’s 500 biggest companies without lifting a finger. The idea was popularised by John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, who is basically the father of passive investing. His pitch was beautifully simple: don’t try to find the needle, just buy the haystack. For most people, over a long time horizon, he was right.

Here’s the part that matters for today, though. That list — the index — isn’t frozen. It gets rebalanced: companies get added, companies get dropped, weights shift. And when that happens, every passive fund tracking that index has to automatically buy or sell to match the new list. No human sits there approving it. The rules of the index change, and billions of dollars move accordingly.

And this isn’t just your personal brokerage account. An enormous share of this money comes from pension funds — the retirement savings of millions of people who have never once looked at what’s inside.

Keep that mechanism in your back pocket: when the index changes, your money follows — whether you’re paying attention or not.

The Nasdaq-100 (and the SpaceX drama)

Let’s zoom in on one specific index: the Nasdaq-100. If the S&P 500 is “big American companies,” the Nasdaq-100 is roughly “the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange” — very tech-heavy, the Apples and Nvidias and Microsofts of the world. Most people get exposure to it through a single wildly popular fund called QQQ (that’s just its ticker — its nickname is “the Qs”). If you hold QQQ, you invest in the Nasdaq-100.

Now, that phrase — non-financial — is going to matter a lot in a minute. Hold onto it.

But first, a perfect real-world example of the mechanism landing right on our heads, literally this month. SpaceX recently went public, and Nasdaq rewrote its own index rules to let it in fast. The old rules made a new company wait and clear a minimum “float” bar (float = the portion of shares actually available to trade). The new rules, live since May 2026, let any freshly listed top-40 company join after just 15 trading days, scrapped the minimum-float requirement, and even gave low-float names a boosted weighting. The result: SpaceX was fast-tracked into the Nasdaq-100 on July 7, 2026, and QQQ funds had to go out and buy roughly $4 billion of it — money raised by trimming a little off every other company in the index to make room.

Nobody who owns QQQ was asked. There was no vote. The index committee changed a rule, and a few billion dollars of other people’s retirement money bought a rocket company. (Worth noting: S&P looked at the same situation and refused to change its rules — so this was a choice, not a law of nature.)

I’m not saying that’s good or bad. SpaceX might be a wonderful investment. The point is narrower and, I think, more important: the rules of the index decided what you own, and you found out afterwards.

So what does any of this have to do with Bitcoin?

Here is the “guilty ticker”: MSTR.

MicroStrategy — recently renamed simply Strategy, though the ticker is still MSTR — used to be a sleepy business-software company. Then, back in 2020, its founder Michael Saylor made one of the boldest corporate bets I’ve ever seen: he started using the company’s cash, and then borrowed money, to buy Bitcoin. A lot of it. Billions of dollars of it. The company essentially transformed itself into a giant pile of Bitcoin with a software business bolted on the side.

Crucially, this was well before you could easily buy Bitcoin through a regular ETF (those only arrived in 2024). So for years, if you wanted Bitcoin exposure inside a normal brokerage account — no crypto wallet, no exchange, no seed phrases to lose — buying MSTR shares was one of the few ways to do it. It became the market’s favourite “Bitcoin proxy”: a stock that moves up and down with the price of Bitcoin.

And it doesn’t just move with Bitcoin — it tends to move more. Because Strategy borrows money to buy more Bitcoin, it’s what’s called leveraged exposure: leverage just means using borrowed money to amplify a bet. When Bitcoin rises, MSTR often rises harder; when Bitcoin falls, MSTR tends to fall harder too. It’s Bitcoin with the volume turned up.

You can probably see where this is going. In December 2024, MSTR was added to the Nasdaq-100 — which means it landed inside QQQ, which means it landed inside a great many ordinary retirement portfolios. So yes: if you hold a Nasdaq-100 fund, you are exposed to the price of Bitcoin. Whether you wanted to be or not. :)

To be fair and keep myself honest: MSTR is only a small slice of the index, so this is a real exposure, not a huge one. But it’s there — quietly, automatically, and for most people invisibly.

In my opinion, it shouldn’t be there

Here’s where I’ll stop reporting and start opining, so take this as my personal view.

Remember that word we held onto — non-financial? The Nasdaq-100 is explicitly meant to exclude financial companies. And calling MSTR “non-financial” in 2026 feels, to me, like a bit of a stretch. Don’t take my word for it — go have a look at Strategy’s own website, where the front page tracks its Bitcoin holdings in real time, and judge for yourself.

Yes, technically there’s still a software business in there. But the overwhelming majority of the company’s value is Bitcoin and the machinery built around holding it. Strategy now issues elaborate financial instruments to fund its Bitcoin habit — including a high-yield product nicknamed “Stretch” (ticker STRC), a kind of preferred stock paying around 11.5% a year. (Preferred stock is a hybrid that sits between a share and a bond, usually prized for a steady dividend — a dividend being a regular cash payment to holders.) A company whose headline products include an 11.5%-yielding financial instrument is doing… a lot of finance.

And then came the kicker that, for me, settles the argument. In 2026, Strategy began selling some of its Bitcoin to fund the dividends on that preferred stock — its first Bitcoin sale since 2022 — as those dividend obligations ballooned past a billion dollars a year. So, we have a supposedly non-financial software company, selling its treasury asset to pay the yield on a financial product it engineered. If that’s a tech company, then the label has stopped meaning very much.

So could a strong case be made that MSTR doesn’t belong in a “non-financial” index? I think so. But it’s in there — which is precisely why you’re exposed to Bitcoin’s price whether you like it or not.

The real takeaway

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read this as “index funds are a scam.” They aren’t. Passive investing is one of the great financial inventions of the last century, and Bogle did ordinary savers an enormous favour. I still believe in it, and I still use it as part of a diversified strategy.

But amazing and worth understanding aren’t opposites. The lesson isn’t “sell everything.” The lesson is awareness — that behind the calm surface of a passive fund there’s a living set of rules quietly deciding what you own, and those rules can put a rocket company or a leveraged Bitcoin bet into your retirement account without ever asking. You don’t need to obsess over it. You just need to know it’s happening, peek under the hood now and then, and actually understand what you’re investing in.

Because “I just own the market” is a comforting thing to say. It’s also, once you look closely, a little more interesting — and a little more Bitcoin-flavoured — than most people realise :)

Happy Investing,

Francesco