Wall Street's Rule for Bitcoin Miners: Stay Allergic to Debt

Ninety-four percent. That is how far the average Bitcoin mining stock fell from peak to trough in the last cycle, according to Matt Siegel, head of research at VanEck. He said it on the IPO 101 for Bitcoin Miners panel at Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale, recorded in March 2025, and he said a number of those companies went bankrupt because they had levered up.

So what does a Wall Street analyst look for now? Siegel put it plainly: "I look for management teams that are allergic to debt." He wants bootstrapped companies that reinvest their own capital profitably. If a miner borrows to buy Bitcoin, he said, that is a strategy he can run himself. He does not need a miner to do it for him.

He also said that, by definition, a Bitcoin miner has no moat. It is a commodity business. A company can build an edge through access to machines, through cheap energy, or through a team that moves faster than its rivals.

Anthony Power, CEO of the data platform Power Mining Analysis, started with energy, the biggest cost in the business. Every halving, he said, revenue falls while the energy cost effectively doubles. He pointed to IREN, buying Texas power at the market rate and mining when the price makes sense. And he told the story of Marathon's joint venture in Abu Dhabi, where the grid runs air conditioning all day and has power to spare at night, which is when the miners run.

Kevin Deedy, a research analyst at H.C. Wainwright, said he was the first on Wall Street in the States to write about the space, back in 2018. For him, the quality that matters most is a management team's flexibility.

Ruben Sahakyan of Stifel KBW explained why so many miners have moved their headquarters to the United States. To reach deep capital you need index inclusion, and for that you need a U.S. domicile. It brings SEC supervision and higher reporting costs. But he noted how quickly policy had turned, saying that two months earlier people might have been going to jail, and now they were all going public.

On the move into high-performance computing, Siegel said the single biggest variable in a stock price is the cost of capital, and an HPC data center company's is much lower. The panel's closing words were a caution, though: Bitcoin mining is not going away, not every site can host HPC, and the advice for miners was minimal debt, minimal dilution and a clear message from the CEO.

When the panel met, Bitcoin was at eighty-seven thousand, three hundred ninety-three dollars. Today it is at eighty-two thousand, three hundred twenty-eight.

The full story is on Intelligence Disrupt at intelligencedisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.