Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF Shows Up Fashionably Late, Still Grabs $30M on Day One — Cheapest Spot in the Room Though

Morgan Stanley officially entered the Bitcoin ETF game on April 8th, becoming the first major Wall Street bank to launch its own BTC-tracking fund under the ticker MSBT on NYSE Arca. The debut saw $30.6 million in inflows on day one, according to Farside Investors ETF monitor. Not exactly lighting money on fire, but hey, they're here for a good time, not a long time.

Bloomberg Senior Analyst Eric Balchunas had actually predicted this exact figure, but compared to the OG Bitcoin ETF launches back on January 11, 2024, MSBT's first day was relatively modest. Back then, Bitwise's BITB pulled in $237.9 million, Fidelity's FBTC snagged $227 million, and even BlackRock's IBIT managed a cool $111.7 million on day one. Morgan Stanley showed up 90 days late to the party with a six-pack, and somehow still walked away with $30M. Not bad for a bank that probably still has "Bitcoin is too volatile" in its old pitch decks.

Only a handful of spot Bitcoin ETFs saw smaller first-day numbers than MSBT: Invesco's BTCO, Valkyrie's BRRR, Wisdom Tree's BTCW, and VanEck's HOLD. In this economy, being faster than four other ETFs is actually an achievement worth putting on a résumé.

Despite showing up late to the Bitcoin ETF party, MSBT does have one secret weapon: it's the cheapest spot Bitcoin fund on the market with an expense ratio of just 14 basis points. Compare that to BlackRock's IBIT at 11 basis points or Grayscale's GBTC at a wallet-crushing 1.5% — wait, sorry, 150 basis points. Yeah, the gap is real. MSBT said "we may be late, but at least we won't bleed you dry," and honestly? That energy is respectable.

"The demand, especially from high-net-worth investors, has been quite high," said Allyson Wallace, Global Head of ETFs at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, in a Bloomberg interview. "Viewed at the firm level, this is an asset class that is not going away." Translation: "Our rich clients kept asking for this, so we finally stopped pretending we didn't want their money."

The timing wasn't bad either. The broader crypto market surged over 4% on April 8th following news of a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. However, at press time, the market had given back those gains and was hovering around $2.42 trillion with sellers firmly in control. Turns out geopolitics moves markets, but not as much as good old-fashioned profit-taking. Classic.

Bitcoin, for its part, was still holding above $70,000, trading at $71,501.17. Morgan Stanley's new ETF is already in the green just by existing. If only everything in crypto were this easy.