Marathon, Riot among most overvalued Bitcoin mining stocks: Report
Bitcoin (BTC) mining heavyweights Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms are among the most overvalued crypto mining companies relative to their competitors, says MinerMetrics founder and analyst Jaran Mellerud.
The key metric backing Mellerud's claim is enterprise value-to-sales ratio — measuring a company's value to its sales revenue. The higher the ratio, the more overvalued a company is.
The miners with the highest EV/S ratios are Cipher at 7.8, Marathon and Iris Energy each at 5.6 and Riot at 5.5, according to a Nov. 3 report by Mellerud.
Mellerud attributed the heavyweight’s high EV/S ratios to receiving more institutional attention from the likes of BlackRock.
Mellerud told Cointelegraph in the coming months he expects investors to start allocating to other players "which could even out the valuation discrepancies between these stocks,” he said.
He suggested there are better-priced opportunities with lower EV/S ratios that could be capitalized on.
Riot’s high EV-to-Hashrate ratio at 156 is another indicator pointing toward its overvaluation, says Mellerud.
Mellerud, previously an analyst at Bitcoin miner Luxor Technology, noted Riot has “massive growth” priced in as it’s constructing its a gigawatt site and awaits the delivery of 33,000 MicroBT machines in early 2024.
“In addition, Riot has several business lines that are not reflected in its self-mining hashrate, meaning we should be careful in drawing any valuation conclusions from its high EV-to-Hashrate ratio,” Mellerud added.
The Bitcoin mining sector has rebounded strongly in 2023, led by Marathon (MARA) and Riot (RIOT), whose share prices have respectively increased 170% and 228%, according to Google Finance.
The mining stocks have outperformed Bitcoin over the same
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