Canada’s Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) has made a notable return to Strategy (MSTR) by buying a stake in the firm, according to its latest U.S. regulatory filing.
In its first-quarter 13F disclosure, the Canadian pension investment manager reported buying 1,382,000 Strategy shares for roughly $172.5 million. Based on the reported figures, AIMCo’s average purchase price comes to about $125 per share.
The price of MSTR has been trading around $175 mark, bringing the total cost of AIMCo’s purchase of shares to about $241 million. The difference represents unrealized gains totaling almost $69 million in just one quarter, owing to the high growth trajectory experienced by the share and other Bitcoin-related assets.
AIMCo is one of Canada’s largest institutional investors, managing over $140 billion worth of assets on behalf of the province of Alberta’s public sector pension funds by December 2025. As such, every move made by the institution usually attracts attention from international financial markets, particularly those linked to digital asset-based stocks.
A 13F is a compulsory quarterly filing document that must be submitted by institutional investment managers holding investments valued above $100 million in U.S. equities.
Although not a real-time tracker of positioning, it is a very useful tool that allows investors to see where the money is being invested at quarter-end.
AIMCo’s previous interest in Strategy
It is worth noting that the stake purchase was not AIMCo’s first contact with Strategy, with FactSet data revealing that the firm had already held close to 198,000 shares of the firm between late 2019 and mid-2020.
However, AIMCo had completely divested of the holding in September 2020, just months before Strategy CEO, Michael Saylor made the critical move in August 2020 that would completely change Strategy’s identity in the market.
By deciding that Strategy will keep its treasury reserves in Bitcoin rather than traditional assets such as US Treasury Bills, Strategy has essentially transformed from being simply a business intelligence software firm into becoming a proxy play on Bitcoin itself.
This transformation is important, as it means that Strategy has now become important for institutional players. Many countries either restrict pension funds and other asset management firms from owning Bitcoin or make it difficult to hold onto the cryptocurrency.
Companies such as Strategy act as the link that connects conventional finance with the cryptocurrency market. On the same note, exchange-traded funds such as iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) from BlackRock have been employed as another common means to invest in Bitcoin.
Institutions shift to structured Bitcoin exposure
The renewed investment in Strategy from AIMCo further highlights the larger trend. Instead of steering clear from any sort of crypto exposure, big players are increasingly becoming more creative in their approach and making investments in crypto exposure that can be managed and fits within their existing framework while still allowing for upside correlated to the Bitcoin price.
This decision comes at a very important time, taking into consideration that there has been an upsurge in demand for Bitcoin-related investments recently due to increasing interest from institutional players.
In particular, the correlation between the prices of Strategy’s own stocks and Bitcoin’s prices remains quite high, providing a sort of leverage investment proxy for the digital currency.
On the whole, one can see that the move made by AIMCo is representative of the efforts made by more traditional financial entities to include exposure to the cryptocurrency world through stocks and derivatives.
