BNY Mellon Boosts Strive Holding by 28% Ahead of 13F Deadline

Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) increased its position in Strive (ASST) by 28% during the third quarter, according to a Form 13F submitted to the SEC on Nov. 5. The filing showed the holding grew to 237,100 shares, valued at $6.97 million based on Sept. 30 prices.

That represents an addition of 51,544 shares compared with the 185,556 shares BNY disclosed for June 30, when the same stake was worth roughly $2.02 million. The dollar increase was largely driven by the stock's performance. ASST’s implied price in the two filings jumped from $10.91 at the end of June to $29.41 three months later, meaning the disclosed stake more than tripled in value even as the share count rose by 28%.

A 13F filing provides a snapshot rather than a trading record. BNY submitted a combined report that aggregates holdings across its group, so the Strive line may include client, fund and discretionary positions rather than a single proprietary bet. The firm may also have adjusted its position since Sept. 30. The bank oversees $63.4 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration and $2.2 trillion in assets under management, both figures as of Sept. 30.

Compared with other bitcoin-linked lines on the same report, the Strive stake remains modest. BNY held 1,056,230 shares of Strategy (MSTR) valued at $161.7 million and 162,072 shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) worth $7.67 million. That IBIT position nearly doubled from 85,282 shares at June 30 and is now roughly the same size as the Strive holding.

Monday’s deadline still has a few large filers outstanding

Institutional managers with investment discretion over $100 million or more in 13F securities are given 45 days after quarter-end to disclose those holdings. That window ran to Nov. 14, a Saturday, pushing the deadline to Monday, Nov. 16.

JPMorgan Chase submitted its third-quarter 13F on Thursday. Wells Fargo, Millennium Management and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors had not yet appeared on the SEC’s EDGAR system as of Thursday morning. Those firms are among the larger managers whose bitcoin ETF and treasury-stock lines, if any, have not yet been made public.

BNY filed earlier than most. Its submission came on Nov. 5, more than a week ahead of the deadline. That is why the Strive line is already public while a handful of large managers remain unaccounted for.

Other banks already disclosed bitcoin ETF positions

Barclays, in a 13F submitted on Nov. 6, reported 3,942,900 IBIT shares worth $186.7 million at Sept. 30, up 48% from 2,658,147 shares three months earlier. Citigroup, in a filing dated Nov. 4, reported 521,144 IBIT shares valued at $24.7 million, up from 347,114 at June 30, and a new $118.9 million position in Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC), or 1,636,387 shares, that had not appeared on its June 30 filing.

Those lines carry the same caveat as BNY’s Strive stake: a 13F gathers client, managed and trading-book positions and is not proof a bank committed its own capital to bitcoin or a bitcoin treasury stock.

Strive itself has continued purchasing the underlying asset. The company held 43,153 bitcoin after adding 29 coins in the week through Nov. 6, according to a recent 8-K, making it one of the larger public bitcoin treasury names after Strategy. That is one reason banks and asset managers now appear in its 13F lines. Europe’s largest asset manager, Amundi, also increased its Strategy stake by 44% in the same quarter, a reminder that traditional managers continued adding bitcoin proxies even as the spot market cooled into the fall.

Monday’s remaining filings will show whether other large managers added or cut bitcoin treasury names after a quarter in which ASST ran hard. For now, BNY’s Nov. 5 filing is the record it left: 237,100 Strive shares, up 28%, marked at $6.97 million.