Mike Alfred is a value investor and entrepreneur with a net worth of $10 million as of 2021. He got started trading tech companies and penny stocks in the late 1990’s from his Stanford University dorm room. This was during the dotcom bubble where internet stocks were skyrocketing and later crashed.
The whole experience was invaluable for Mike, teaching him lessons about making and losing money. He had turned $14,000 into $52,000 at the peak but was left with $20,000 when the market tanked. This is why he initially dismissed cryptocurrencies as an investment opportunity due to its similarity with the dotcom bubble.
Alfred is mostly known for tweeting about Bitcoin but he does have a strong business acumen that has made him a multi-millionaire. In 2008, Mike co-founded BrightScope alongside his brother Ryan. BrightScope was the first online rating system for 401(k) retirement plans and was sold to Strategic Insight for $35 – $40 million in 2016.
Two years later he co-founded Digital Assets Data (a mini Bloomberg), a financial analytics company building enterprise software and data feeds for crypto hedge funds, market makers and banks. In early 2021, Digital Assets Data was acquired by NYDIG. Mike spent eight months working at NYDIG and got an opportunity to see how the institutional business was being built at scale in the Bitcoin and crypto marketplace.
Since his exit from NYDIG, Mike started a Twitter account to share his investing insights with the retail plebs. He’s gradually built up a decent following and now has over 38,000 followers. If the bull market continues it won’t be long until he surpasses the 100,000 milestone.
Within the next year, he plans to start an investment fund which will be a combination of traditional value investing and crypto. He will start off using personal capital at first before taking on outside money. The fund will most likely be a split between 40% bitcoin and 60% value stocks, a solid structure to yield favourable risk adjusted returns.
Outside of owning Bitcoin, Mike also invests in crypto related businesses such as bitcoin miners and exchanges. Hut 8 and Marathon Digital Holdings are his favourite Bitcoin miners to buy mainly because both companies will hold their Bitcoin. Coinbase is another excellent investment and is largely misunderstood by investors and he expects the exchange to grow rapidly over the next 10-15 years.
