Famed short-seller James Chanos believes that enterprise intelligence agency Technique is likely one of the biggest pure arbitrage alternatives he has ever seen.
Chanos argued that there’s an “$80B actionable unfold” between Technique and the Bitcoin it holds.
Technique owns an infinite quantity of Bitcoin, however the inventory market can worth the corporate at considerably lower than the market worth of these Bitcoin holdings.
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Technique presently holds about 847,363 BTC. With Bitcoin round $64,000 on August 18, these holdings are value roughly $54 billion.
That mentioned, MSTR and Bitcoin usually are not economically similar. Proudly owning MSTR provides you publicity to Bitcoin, but additionally publicity to Technique’s debt, most popular securities, financing prices, software program enterprise, and administration choices.
Chanos’s wager in opposition to Saylor
Chanos is a well-known brief vendor, and he beforehand argued that MSTR was buying and selling at an infinite premium to its Bitcoin holdings. In 2025, he explicitly described his commerce as promoting MSTR whereas shopping for Bitcoin.
Chanos and his agency, Chanos & Co., started constructing the place in late 2024, with reporting inserting the preliminary brief round October-November 2024. By November, MSTR’s a number of to the worth of its Bitcoin holdings had risen above 3x at factors.
From late 2024 into 2025, MSTR’s premium over its underlying Bitcoin publicity contracted dramatically. By November 2025, the mNAV had fallen to roughly 1.23x.
Chanos exited the commerce in November 2025. Extra exactly, Chanos & Co. unwound the MSTR/Bitcoin hedge on Nov. 7.
The short-seller’s most well-known commerce was Enron. Chanos started investigating the corporate in 2000 after noticing that points of its monetary statements didn’t make financial sense.
In 2020, Chanos shorted Luckin Espresso. Luckin subsequently disclosed that roughly $310 million in 2019 gross sales had been fabricated.
The Wirecard commerce was one other main success. Chanos grew to become satisfied that the German funds firm was not almost as worthwhile because it claimed.