A bitcoin miner ETF has quietly outrun the most famous corporate bitcoin holder on the market this year, and it did so without owning a single share of that company. The CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (NASDAQ:WGMI) is up 47.58% year to date through July 6, 2026, even as bitcoin itself has slipped. Notably absent from the fund: MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR | MSTR Price Prediction), now branded Strategy, the world’s largest corporate bitcoin treasury holder.
The absence is by design, baked into the fund’s mandate.
What WGMI Actually Owns
WGMI is an actively managed ETF focused on the picks-and-shovels side of bitcoin: the companies that mine the coin and the vendors that sell them chips, hardware, software, and services. Per its stated objective, the fund invests at least 80% of net assets in companies that derive at least 50% of their revenue or profits from bitcoin mining operations or from supplying miners. That is a narrow universe, populated by names typical of the mining sector such as Marathon Digital, Riot Platforms, and CleanSpark.
MicroStrategy does not fit that screen. It is a software company headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia, classified under application software, that has adopted bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset. The company holds coins; it does not mine them. That distinction, subtle to a casual observer, is decisive to an index built around mining revenue.
Why the Fund Is Up
The year-to-date run is striking because it has happened against a soft backdrop for bitcoin itself. The cryptocurrency is down 26.66% year to date, yet the miners in WGMI have expanded operating leverage, benefited from post-halving efficiency gains, and, in several cases, pivoted capacity toward AI and high-performance computing tenants. Miners with low power costs and modern rigs have compounded margins even in a lower-price bitcoin environment.
Over a longer window, the fund is up 116.98% over the past year, closing July 6 at $56.48.
The Recent Drawdown Is Real
The strong YTD figure masks a rough stretch. WGMI is down 11.33% over the trailing week and 8.3% over the past month, and it slipped 5.1% in the July 7 session to $53.60. Miners are high-beta bitcoin proxies, and the recent volatility is a reminder that this is a concentrated, cyclical corner of the market.
Why MicroStrategy’s Exclusion Matters
Compare WGMI’s run to what MicroStrategy shares have done. MSTR is down 33.68% year to date and 75.06% over the past year, closing July 6 at $100.77. The company’s Q1 2026 report showed a net loss of $12.54 billion, driven by a $14.46 billion unrealized loss on bitcoin holdings under new fair-value accounting rules, with diluted EPS of -$38.25. The company still holds 818,334 BTC as of early May 2026, making it the dominant corporate holder, but the accounting mark and share dilution from $7.37 billion in Q1 ATM offerings have weighed on the stock.
A fund that owned MSTR would have carried that drag. WGMI, built around operating miners, sidestepped it. That is the practical consequence of an index methodology that draws a hard line between mining bitcoin and holding it.
Context and Caveats
Investors seeking direct exposure to bitcoin, or to MicroStrategy’s leveraged treasury strategy, will not find it here. Broader crypto-equity ETFs and spot bitcoin funds take a different route, and some include MSTR at meaningful weights. WGMI’s narrower design cuts both ways: it captures upside when miners outperform the coin, and it concentrates risk in a small group of operationally similar, energy-intensive businesses.
WGMI is also a relatively young, actively managed product with limited operating history, and its holdings can shift as the manager rotates among miners. Readers screening the space may find broader context useful in our AI power and infrastructure research, given how many miners are now leasing capacity to data-center tenants.
Past performance does not guarantee future results, and nothing here is investment advice.
The Takeaway
WGMI’s YTD gain without MicroStrategy in the portfolio is a clean illustration of how mandate design shapes returns. If your thesis is that bitcoin miners, as operating businesses, will outperform bitcoin itself and the companies that merely hold it, the fund is aligned with that view. If your thesis is corporate treasury adoption, WGMI is the wrong vehicle by construction.
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