Bitcoin ETF premiums, discounts and mNAV

It’s the gap between what you pay for a share and what the Bitcoin behind that share is worth, using the net asset value per share that each fund publishes once a day. Paying $51 for a share backed by $50 of Bitcoin is a 2% premium, and paying $49 would be a 2% discount. With the big US spot funds the gap is usually a tiny fraction of a percent, because authorised participants trade it away, so in practice the idea matters much more for closed-end trusts and for listed companies that hold Bitcoin, which is where most of this page goes.

See US spot ETF prices and holdings

Only if the discount narrows while you hold, and nothing forces it to. A discount that stays the same from the day you buy to the day you sell leaves you with exactly Bitcoin’s return, and one that widens costs you money even if Bitcoin rises. We’d also ask why the discount exists in the first place. When GBTC traded close to 50% below its Bitcoin at the end of 2022, holders couldn’t redeem their shares, and the gap only closed after the trust converted into an ETF in January 2024, which took more than a year and needed a court ruling against the SEC along the way.

There isn’t a figure we’d call good, and we don’t rank companies by it. An mNAV of 1x means the market values the company at the same amount as its Bitcoin, so you could read anything above that as investors paying for the business, the management or the expectation of buying more Bitcoin with new shares, and anything below it as doubt about the company’s debts, costs or plans. We’d treat a single reading with caution, because it tells you very little without the company’s debts and the rest of its balance sheet next to it.

mNAV for every listed holder

It comes down to whether shares can be swapped for the Bitcoin. An ETF’s can: when a spot fund trades above the value of its Bitcoin, authorised participants hand the fund cash or Bitcoin, take newly created shares and sell them, and when it trades below they do the reverse, buying shares cheaply and redeeming them, so the price keeps getting pulled back. A treasury company has nothing like that, and as far as we can tell nothing stops its share price sitting well above or below its Bitcoin for months at a time, which is why we read mNAV as a measure of what investors expect from the business more than a pricing error waiting to close.