Author: Wu Says Blockchain
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Thomas Jong Lee, commonly known as Tom Lee, is a well-known stock market strategist, research director, and financial commentator in the United States.
He was born in Westland, Michigan, to a Korean immigrant family as the third child. His father was a psychiatrist, and his mother transitioned from being a housewife to a Subway franchise operator. Lee later attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in finance and accounting. According to a January 2021 report by The Wall Street Journal, Lee often cooks to relax after a busy day, particularly enjoying trying to recreate the Korean dishes his mother made. He is low-key, scholarly in style, and rarely rebuts critics, instead attempting to respond with data. In an interview, he stated, "I can't refute critics. I don't know what will happen. The stock market doesn't care about my opinion, so I can only try to understand what the market is saying."
Lee's Wall Street career began in the 1990s, working at Kidder Peabody and Salomon Smith Barney. He joined JPMorgan Chase in 1999 and served as the bank's chief equity strategist from 2007 until his departure in 2014. During his tenure, he gained media attention for his optimistic market views and was also involved in industry controversies due to his commitment to critical research.
In 2002, Lee, as a telecommunications analyst at JPMorgan, published a research report on the wireless operator Nextel, questioning whether its customer churn rate and bad debt provisions accurately reflected reality. On the day the report was released, Nextel's stock price briefly fell by 8%, after which the company's executives strongly retaliated. The CFO and general counsel called JPMorgan's research director and legal department, accusing Lee of using misleading assumptions and even suspecting that he had leaked parts of the report to specific investors before its official release. JPMorgan subsequently conducted a two-week internal investigation, reviewing his emails and call records, ultimately confirming that Lee had not engaged in any misconduct. The Wall Street Journal reported on the incident under the headline "Unhappy Firm Bites Back," sparking widespread discussion about the independence of Wall Street analysts. This incident became a representative conflict in Lee's career and established his data-driven research style, which does not cater to market or investment banking client pressures.
In 2014, Lee co-founded the independent research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors and served as its research director, successfully transitioning from a traditional investment banking strategist to a leader of an independent research firm. He was one of the first Wall Street strategists to incorporate Bitcoin into mainstream valuation frameworks. In 2017, Lee published a report titled "A framework for valuing bitcoin as a substitute for gold," proposing for the first time that Bitcoin has the potential to partially replace gold as a store of value. The framework was built on three key parameters: the average annual growth rate of the U.S. monetary base (approximately 6.5%), the multiple of the value of alternative assets like gold to the total money supply (approximately 400% in the model), and Bitcoin's potential market share in that alternative value system (with a model benchmark of 5%). According to this valuation model, Bitcoin's theoretical value midpoint in 2022 was $20,300, with sensitivity analysis showing a valuation range between $12,000 and $55,000. Lee noted in the report that as the total market capitalization of crypto assets surpassed $50 billion, central banks and institutional investors might consider including it in their foreign exchange reserves and asset allocation.
In the same year, Lee also introduced his short-term valuation model on a Business Insider program, based on Metcalfe's Law (which states that network value is proportional to the square of the number of users), using the number of Bitcoin independent addresses as a user proxy, multiplied by the average daily trading volume per user, leading to a regression analysis that could explain about 94% of Bitcoin's price movements since 2013.
Lee's research style emphasizes data-driven analysis and historical analogies, particularly excelling in medium- to long-term trend forecasting. In March 2020, when the pandemic triggered a global market crash, Lee was one of the first strategists to predict a "V-shaped recovery," firmly advising investors to buy the dip. In May 2021, after Bitcoin significantly retraced from its $60,000 peak to the $30,000 range and briefly rebounded, Lee appeared on CNBC's "TechCheck" program, reiterating his earlier view from December 2020 that Bitcoin would break $100,000 by the end of the year. He stated, "Bitcoin is inherently extremely volatile, but it is this volatility that brings opportunities for returns," adding, "Even if Bitcoin is currently out of favor, I still believe it can break $100,000 by year-end." Furthermore, as early as 2019, Lee had suggested on CNBC that ordinary investors allocate 1% to 2% of their assets to Bitcoin, to which the host responded in surprise, "That sounds kind of crazy." This clip later went viral, becoming a representative moment of his steadfast position on Bitcoin.
In December 2023, Lee proposed in Fundstrat's annual outlook that the S&P 500 would rise to 5,200 points in 2024, while the index was still around 4,600; this target was achieved ahead of schedule in mid-2024. He later stated on Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast that, benefiting from corporate earnings growth, valuation reassessment, and technological innovation, the S&P 500 could reach 15,000 points by 2030, and reiterated that Bitcoin's long-term potential valuation could reach the million-dollar level with continued growth in wallet adoption.
Throughout his career, Lee has also experienced key judgment errors. In the 1990s, he was optimistic about the rapid growth of the wireless communications industry, but after the internet bubble burst, the related sector plummeted. Before the 2008 financial crisis, he also underestimated the systemic risks in the real estate market, later admitting that this was one of the biggest lessons he learned—that stock market movements are highly dependent on confidence in the credit market. He stated in an interview, "Once the credit market loses confidence, no financial market can remain unaffected." These setbacks prompted him to place greater emphasis on cyclical indicators and the structure of capital flows in the future, establishing his research style anchored in historical data.
Lee is actively featured on mainstream financial programs such as CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNN, serving as a guest commentator and market strategy analyst on CNBC's "Fast Money," "TechCheck," "Halftime Report," and "Closing Bell." He has garnered attention from investors for his independent views and successful predictions of macro market trends. During the significant decline of U.S. stocks in 2022, Lee maintained a bullish stance and proposed mid-year that the market had bottomed out, a view that was later validated, thus earning him the title of a contrarian optimist in the "Wall of Worry."
Currently, Tom Lee also serves as an investment strategy advisor at NewEdge Wealth, continuing to share cutting-edge insights at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets.
Strategic Layout: Leading BitMine, Advancing Ethereum's Fiscal Model
In June 2025, Lee was appointed chairman of the board of BitMine Immersion Technologies (NASDAQ: BMNR), beginning his involvement in the company's strategic transformation from traditional mining to an enterprise-level Ethereum (ETH) reserve structure. BitMine is a digital asset infrastructure company based in Las Vegas, Nevada, initially focused on Bitcoin mining, utilizing immersion cooling technology to enhance energy efficiency and computational stability, aiming to build a high-performance, low-cost blockchain computing platform.
In the month of his appointment, the company completed a PIPE private placement financing, issuing 55,555,556 shares of common stock and related securities, priced at $4.50 per share, raising $250 million, and subsequently submitted an S-3ASR automatic registration statement to initiate an ATM (at-the-market) program of up to $2 billion, with Cantor Fitzgerald and ThinkEquity serving as sales agents, with funds intended for building ETH fiscal reserves.
As of mid-July, the company disclosed that its total ETH holdings reached 300,657 coins, with a market value exceeding $1 billion, including approximately 60,000 in-the-money options supported by $200 million in cash. Lee stated that the company is working towards the goal of "acquiring and staking 5% of the total Ethereum supply."
Subsequently, Founders Fund disclosed a 9.1% stake in BMNR, and ARK Invest also purchased 4,773,444 shares of BMNR stock through an over-the-counter agreement, with a transaction amount of approximately $182 million, announcing that it would convert all into ETH reserves to support the company's strategy.
In late July, BMNR launched options trading, further enhancing the liquidity of its stock. The latest disclosures show that BitMine's ETH holdings increased to 566,776 coins, with a market value exceeding $2 billion, nearly 8 times the initial PIPE amount, making it one of the publicly listed companies with the largest ETH holdings globally.
Lee: Stablecoins Drive Ethereum to Become the Institutional Choice
In a recent interview with Amit Kukreja and CoinDesk, Tom Lee expressed his strong optimism for the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly driven by the trends of stablecoins and the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA). He pointed out that the rise of stablecoins represents a "ChatGPT moment" for the crypto space, with the global stablecoin market cap exceeding $250 billion, of which over 50% of issuance and about 30% of gas fees occur on the Ethereum network. As stablecoins gain support from the U.S. Treasury and Wall Street, Ethereum is gradually becoming a key infrastructure connecting crypto and traditional finance.
As chairman of BitMine, Lee noted that compared to ETFs or on-chain custody models, Ethereum fiscal-type public companies have five structural advantages:
They can purchase ETH through issuing additional shares when the stock price is above net asset value (NAV), achieving a reflexive uplift in NAV per share;
They can use tools like issuing convertible bonds and selling options to hedge volatility, achieving low-cost or even zero-cost positions while reducing financing costs;
They have the capability to acquire other on-chain fiscal-type companies, further amplifying NAV leverage;
They can expand into ETH staking, DeFi yields, on-chain infrastructure, and other businesses to build sustainable cash flow sources;
Once their ETH holdings occupy a core position in the on-chain ecosystem, or become a key node in stablecoin payment and settlement networks, they will have a position similar to a "sovereign put," potentially becoming strategic assets prioritized for acquisition by financial institutions.
Lee emphasized that as platforms like Robinhood launch stock tokenization services through Ethereum Layer 2, more institutions are beginning to embrace compliant and scalable blockchain platforms, with Ethereum currently being the only main chain that meets regulatory adaptability, ecological maturity, and economies of scale.
In the CoinDesk interview, he summarized, "Stablecoins have allowed the crypto industry to experience an explosion similar to ChatGPT. Wall Street is looking for a chain that can carry real assets and comply with regulations, and Ethereum is becoming that intersection." Fundstrat analysts set a short-term technical target for ETH at $4,000, believing its fair value by year-end could reach $10,000 to $15,000. Lee stated, "Allocating ETH at the current price is an effective path for corporate finance to achieve tenfold potential."
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