Harvard University increased its investment in BlackRock's Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) by over 250% within the third quarter after the Ivy League school first bought into the fund earlier this 12 months.
Harvard Management Company, the corporate that manages the university's $57 billion endowment fund, disclosed in a regulatory filing on Friday that it held over 6.8 million shares of the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), valued at $442.8 million, as of Sept. 30.
The university disclosed in August that it had an IBIT position for the primary time, holding about 1.9 million shares value $116.6 million on the time.
“Super rare” for a university to purchase an ETF
Eric Balchunas, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg, said Friday that it’s “extremely rare/difficult to get a foundation to take part in an ETF.”
“This is the perfect endorsement an ETF can get,” he added, but noted that Harvard’s IBIT investment represented “just one% of total capital.”
According to Balchunas, IBIT was Harvard University's largest investment on the time of filing and the “largest position addition within the third quarter,” making it the sixteenth largest ETF holder.
Source: Eric Balchunas
Balchunas said in August after Harvard's initial IBIT purchase that endowments were “particularly against ETFs” and were the “hardest institutions to lock in” when it got here to ETFs.
Harvard increases gold and technology commitment
The remainder of Harvard's investments were primarily in large U.S. technology firms, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google's parent company.
The university also bought a brand new $16.8 million position in buy-now-pay-later fintech Klarna and $59.1 million value of shares in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Harvard also nearly doubled its exposure to gold, increasing its holdings within the gold-backed ETF SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) to 661,391 shares value $235.1 million, up from 333,000 shares in August.
SoSoValue shows that Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs saw net outflows of $1.11 billion within the trading week ending Friday as the value of Bitcoin fell below $100,000.
Bitcoin is now trading below $95,000 after falling to a low of $93,029 within the last 24 hours, briefly erasing gains to this point this 12 months.
