Institutions increase exposure to Grayscale Bitcoin Trust as GBTC discount nears 30%

cointelegraph.com:

Institutional investors are returning to accumulate Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) shares as the discount to spot price his risen to nearly 30%, data on Glassnode shows.

Since December 2021, some weekly sessions saw investors pouring in between $10 million and $120 million into Grayscale's flagship fund. Meanwhile, the biggest capital inflow — amounting to nearly $140 million — appeared in the week ending on Feb. 25, as shown in the chart below.

The GBTC trust attracted investments as global markets faced back-to-back shocks in the past few months, including a dramatic selloff in the technology stocks, followed by Russia's invasion of Ukraine that left many fund managers with a double-digit percentage loss.

For instance, Cathie Wood's ARK Next Generation ETF (ARKW), which holds $478 million worth of GBTC, crashed by nearly 45% year-over-year, primarily owing to its exposure in the sectors that suffered the most during the recent market turbulence, including technology (43.14%) and communication (27.99%).

But in November 2021, ARKW added over 450,000 GBTC shares to its portfolio, when their discounts were as steep as nearly 17.5%.

Similarly, the Morgan Stanley Insight Fund (CPODX) held over 1.5 million GBTC as of Sep. 30, 2021, according to its securities filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Its year-over-year performance as of March 6, 2022, came to be around minus 43%.

Both ARKW and CPODX underperformed as GBTC fell by 43% in the past 12 months. Nonetheless, neither ARKW nor CPODX reported selling significant shares of GBTC.

Many factors attribute to GBTC's underperformance, including rising competition from exchange-traded funds (ETF) in Canada. Unlike GBTC, ETFs allow investors for Share