Financial Times columnist loses stock picking race by betting against Bitcoin

Katie Martin is the long-time stock market columnist for the Financial Times, the European standard of financial business newspapers (with all due respect to La Tribune, L’Echo de la Bourse, the Tijd, the Financieel Dagblad and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but there is no better financial newspaper than the FT, even though I am not British).

Martin has also been a real Bitcoin basher for years, but this time it had consequences for her.

Ranking

Katie Martin is a real Bitcoin basher. When the largest digital currency dipped below $5,000 in 2018 after having gone above $20,000 for the first time earlier that year, she was convinced that the currency would crash to 0 and wrote as much. However, Bitcoin survived and broke through $20,000 again a few years later and has since easily exceeded that price again. Katie, however, did not change her opinion.

But every year the Financial Times organizes a stock market contest at the beginning of January, just like the financial website IEX does every month. You get a budget and can then go ‘long’ or ‘short’ on a number of investments. So last year Katie went ‘short’ on MicroStrategy, the company of Michael Saylor. However, because Bitcoin did so well in 2024, MicroStrategy’s stock price rose explosively, something she clearly had not expected; As a result, Katie’s ranking in the contest dropped visibly. For the official stock market columnist of the largest business newspaper, of course, this was a disgrace. Out of 1,500 participants, she came second to last. Check the current Bitcoin price here.

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Partly because of that ranking, Katie Martin has now pleaded guilty and done a very long interview with Michael Saylor to understand why he chose to spend more than 40 billion dollars of corporate money on Bitcoin. Learn more about Bitcoin here. Time will tell whether Katie will finally become a Bitcoin believer.