8th January 2026 > > MSCI's shame, in all its glory detail.

tl;dr

MSCI has outed itself as being anti-freedom and anti-liberty. Shame on it.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Another half a billion or so dollars of outflows from the spot BTC ETFs suggests that my enthusiasm going into the new year might have been misplaced. In the short term, we should expect continued weakness.

Curious Crypto’s Commentary – MSCI

MSCI, the curator of the world’s leading stock market indices, had previously announced on 10^th October 2025 that it was considering dropping DATCOs (Digital Asset Treasury Companies) whose cryptos assets totalled 50% or more of total assets from its indices. The company that would be most affected by such a decision would be MSTR, which holds over 3% of all BTC in circulation. To the uninformed this raised the risk of forced selling of BTC by MSTR (that ain't going to happen) and resulted in this price action that day:

Zooming out a little we can see even more clearly that this news was a key trigger in the weakness shown by BTC into year-end:

I have good news, and bad news.

MSTR posted this on X:

"MSCI confirmed Digital Asset Treasury Companies will remain in MSCI Indexes for the Feb 2026 review. A strong outcome for neutral indexing and economic reality.”

Tempering the mood somewhat, MSCI had this to say in response:

"Distinguishing between investment companies and other companies that hold non-operating assets, such as digital assets, as part of their core operations rather than for investment purposes requires further research and consultation with market participants.”

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The suggestion I have made to the bigwigs at MSCI is to address that issue head-on with an index designed specifically to track a large basket of investment companies which can later be expanded to a sub-category of just DATCOs. There is little point in the latter for now as it would be dominated by MSTR, but that will change over time.

I will let you know how Henry A. Fernandes, Chairman and CEO of MSCI, responds to my rather tremendous idea, even if I say so myself.

Curious Crypto’s Commentary – Another sting in the tail

Almost as an afterthought, MSCI also announced that its indices will not reflect increases in the number of outstanding shares to take account of new issues of shares.

This is an extraordinary decision which seems to have been taken to deliberately be harmful to DATCOs. Looking at the example of MSTR, it largely funds new purchases of BTC by issuing shares, either directly or via some form of convertible bonds. New shares currently benefit from passive buying by tracker funds. That passive buying is now ruled out suggesting that it will be harder for MSTR to raise funds in the future to buy BTC.

In the narrow case of MSTR, we have the situation in which a third party now intentionally wields significant control over the operations of MSTR. That is surely unconscionable for anyone except for the few remaining foot soldiers in Senator Elizabeth Warren’s anti-freedom and anti-liberty army.

But even those few, those unhappy few, those brothers banded in authoritarianism, should stop and think, for this rule, deliberately targeted to negatively impact DATCOs, will also negatively impact all other companies. Over time, all MSCI indices will start to less effectively track the underlying assets as the real-world market capitalisation of those assets will no longer be reflected by the index. I admit that this is a longer-term outlook, but the knock-on effects of this decision will increase the cost of capital for all business, lowering productivity across the board, and making absolutely everyone poorer as a direct result. As an aside, it would also destroy the entire ETF business, an outcome that the giants of TradFi will not countenance.

One should expect this rule change to be swiftly reversed once its full ramifications are properly considered and highlighted by the financial services industry (*) to those at MSCI whose now blatant anti-crypto agenda is driving decisions that are detrimental to all of us, whether we own cryptos or not.

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(*) Even Vanguard, which will be the last redoubt of anti-crypto sentiment in the TradFi world, is going to complain.