Original Article Title: "Who is TOM LEE? From Wall Street Influencer to Ethereum MicroStrategy Builder"
Original Source: WuShuo Blockchain
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Thomas Jong Lee, commonly known as Tom Lee, is a well-known American stock market strategist, research head, and financial commentator.
He was born in Westland, Michigan, USA, as the third child of a Korean immigrant family. His father is a psychiatrist, and his mother transitioned from a homemaker to a Subway franchisee. Lee later attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored 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 Korean dishes his mother used to make. He is known for his low-key demeanor, scholarly style, and rare rebuttals to critics, preferring to respond with data. In an interview, he once said, "I can't argue with 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, having worked at Kidder Peabody and Salomon Smith Barney. He joined J.P. Morgan Chase in 1999 and became the firm's Chief Equity Strategist in 2007, remaining in that role until he left in 2014. During his tenure, he received media attention for his optimistic market views and was also involved in industry controversies for his commitment to critical research.
In 2002, as a J.P. Morgan telecom analyst, Lee released a research report on the wireless operator Nextel, questioning whether its customer churn and bad debt reserve accounting practices truly reflected the reality. On the day of the report's release, Nextel's stock briefly fell 8%, following which the company's leadership strongly retaliated. The CFO and general counsel separately called J.P. Morgan's research head and legal department, accusing Lee of using misleading assumptions and even suspecting him of leaking part of the report to specific investors before its public release. J.P. Morgan then conducted a two-week internal investigation, reviewing Lee's emails and call records, ultimately confirming that Lee had not engaged in any misconduct. The Wall Street Journal reported on this incident with the headline "Unhappy Firm Bites Back," sparking widespread discussion on the independence of Wall Street analysts. This event became a prominent conflict case in Lee's career and solidified his research style of being data-driven, not succumbing to market and investment banking client pressures.
In 2014, Lee co-founded the independent research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors and served as the head of research, successfully transitioning from a traditional Wall Street 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," which first proposed Bitcoin's potential to partially replace gold as a store of value. The framework is built on three key parameters: the annual average growth rate of the U.S. base money supply (about 6.5%), the multiple of the value of gold and other alternative assets to the total currency supply (approximately 400% in the model), and the potential market share of Bitcoin in this alternative value system (with a model baseline of 5%). According to this valuation model, the theoretical midpoint of Bitcoin's value in 2022 is $20,300, with sensitivity analysis showing a valuation range between $12,000 and $55,000. In the report, Lee pointed out that as the total market capitalization of crypto assets surpasses $500 billion, central banks and institutional investors may consider including them in their foreign exchange reserves and asset allocations.
That same year, Lee also introduced his short-term valuation model on a Business Insider program. Based on Metcalfe's Law (which states that a network's value is proportional to the square of the number of users), he used the number of unique Bitcoin addresses as a proxy for users, multiplied by the average daily transaction volume per user, and conducted a regression analysis. The model has been able to explain approximately 94% of Bitcoin's price movements since 2013.
Lee's research style emphasizes data-driven analysis and historical analogies, particularly excelling in forecasting medium to long-term trends. In March 2020, amidst the global market crash triggered by the pandemic, Lee was one of the earliest strategists to predict a "V-shaped recovery," steadfastly advising investors to buy the dip. In May 2021, during a brief rebound of Bitcoin from a high of $60,000 to the $30,000 range, Lee appeared on CNBC's "TechCheck" program, reiterating his initial view proposed in December 2020 that Bitcoin would surpass $100,000 by year-end. He stated, "Bitcoin is inherently very volatile, but it is this volatility that brings about opportunities for returns," and "Even though Bitcoin is currently in a slump, I still believe it can surpass $100,000 by year-end." Furthermore, as early as 2019, Lee had recommended on a CNBC program that ordinary investors allocate 1% to 2% of their assets to Bitcoin. The host responded in surprise, "That sounds kind of crazy," and this segment subsequently went viral, becoming a representative moment of his unwavering Bitcoin stance.
In December 2023, Lee presented in Fundstrat's annual outlook that the S&P 500 would rise to 5,200 points by 2024, while the index was still around 4,600 at that time; this target was achieved ahead of schedule in mid-2024. He later elaborated on Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast, stating that due to corporate earnings growth, valuation reassessment, and technological innovation, the S&P 500 is expected to reach 15,000 points by 2030. He also reiterated that with the continuous growth of Bitcoin wallet adoption, the long-term potential valuation could reach the million-dollar level.
Throughout his career, Lee has also experienced key judgment errors. In the 1990s, as a wireless communication industry analyst, he was optimistic about the sector's rapid growth, but after the bursting of the dot-com bubble, related segments plummeted significantly. He also once underestimated the systemic risks of the real estate market before the 2008 financial crisis, acknowledging later that this was one of his biggest learning experiences—that the stock market's trend heavily relies on the credit market's confidence. In an interview, he stated: "Once the credit market loses confidence, no financial market can stand alone." These setbacks led him to pay more attention to cyclical indicators and fund flow structures in the future, establishing his research style anchored in historical data.
Lee has been a long-time contributor to mainstream financial programs such as CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNN, regularly serving as a guest commentator and market strategy analyst on CNBC's "Fast Money," "TechCheck," "Halftime Report," and "Closing Bell" programs. He has garnered investor attention for his steadfast independent views and successful macro market trend predictions. During the significant U.S. stock market downturn in 2022, Lee maintained his bullish view and suggested that the market had bottomed out in the middle of the year, a perspective that was later confirmed by subsequent developments, earning him the title of a contrarian optimist in the "Wall of Worry."
Currently, Tom Lee also serves as the Investment Strategy Advisor at NewEdge Wealth, continuing to express cutting-edge views in the intersection of traditional finance and digital asset fields.
In June 2025, Lee was appointed Chairman of the Board at BitMine Immersion Technologies (NASDAQ: BMNR), becoming involved in the company's strategic shift from traditional mining to an enterprise-level Ethereum (ETH) reserve structure. BitMine is a U.S.-based digital asset infrastructure company located in Las Vegas, Nevada, initially focusing on Bitcoin mining and utilizing immersion cooling technology to enhance energy efficiency and mining stability, aiming to establish a high-performance, low-cost blockchain computing platform.
During the month of appointment, the company completed a PIPE private placement financing, issuing 55,555,556 shares of common stock and related securities at a price of $4.50 per share, raising $250 million, and subsequently filed an S-3 ASR automatic shelf registration statement to initiate an ATM (at-the-market) offering program of up to $2 billion, with Cantor Fitzgerald and ThinkEquity serving as sales agents, with the proceeds intended for building an ETH treasury reserve.
As of mid-July, the company disclosed its total ETH holdings reached 300,657 coins, valued at over $1 billion, including approximately 60,000 coins of RSUs supported by $200 million in cash. Lee stated that the company is progressing towards the goal of "acquiring and staking 5% of Ethereum's total supply."
Subsequently, Founders Fund disclosed holding a 9.1% stake in BMNR, and ARK Invest also purchased 4,773,444 shares of BMNR stock through an OTC agreement, with a transaction value of approximately $182 million, and announced that all would be converted to an ETH reserve to support the company's strategy.
In late July, BMNR launched options trading to further enhance stock liquidity. The latest disclosure shows that BitMine's ETH holdings have increased to 566,776 coins, valued at over $2 billion, nearly 8 times the initial PIPE amount, making it one of the publicly traded companies with the largest ETH holdings globally.
In a recent interview with Amit Kukreja for CoinDesk, Tom Lee expressed his strong belief in the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly driven by the stablecoin and Real World Assets (RWA) tokenization trend. He pointed out that the rise of stablecoins represents a "ChatGPT moment" in the crypto space, with the global stablecoin market cap surpassing $250 billion, where over 50% of issuances and approximately 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 bridging crypto with traditional finance.
As the Chairman of the BitMine Board, Lee highlighted that compared to ETFs or on-chain custody models, Ethereum treasury-listed companies have five structural advantages:
1. They can purchase ETH by issuing shares when the stock price is above net asset value (NAV), achieving reflexivity to elevate NAV per share;
2. It can use convertible bonds, sell options, and other tools to hedge volatility, reducing financing costs while achieving low-cost or even zero-cost positions;
3. It has the ability to acquire other on-chain treasury companies, further amplifying NAV leverage;
4. It can expand into ETH staking, DeFi yield, on-chain infrastructure, and other businesses to build sustainable sources of cash flow;
5. Once its ETH holdings occupy a core position in the on-chain ecosystem or become a key node in stablecoin payment and settlement networks, it will have a similar status to a "sovereign put" and may become a strategic asset preferred for acquisition by financial institutions.
Lee emphasized that as platforms like Robinhood launch stock tokenization services on the Ethereum Layer 2, more and more institutions are starting to embrace compliant and scalable blockchain platforms, with Ethereum being the only mainnet currently meeting regulatory adaptability, ecosystem maturity, and economies of scale.
In an interview with CoinDesk, he concluded, "Stablecoins have enabled the crypto industry to experience a breakthrough similar to ChatGPT. Wall Street is looking for a chain that can carry real-world assets and comply with regulations, and Ethereum is becoming that intersection." Fundstrat analysts have 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 treasury to gain 10x potential."
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