The Strategy Shine Wears Off – Why Value Investing is Making a Vengeful Comeback in 2026

A particular type of investor has been made to feel somewhat foolish at dinner parties for the past two years. The type that still pays attention to price-to-earnings ratios, reads annual reports, and feels uneasy when someone calls a company’s balance sheet full of bitcoin a “treasury strategy.” They grinned courteously as Michael Saylor amassed more than 640,000 bitcoin and saw MicroStrategy, which has since changed its name to Strategy, become the favorite of both momentum traders and cryptocurrency enthusiasts. They didn’t say much. They held out. There is a feeling that the patience is beginning to pay off in 2026 as bitcoin drops toward $68,000 and the share prices of crypto treasury companies soften under actual pressure.

It’s important to keep in mind that when Saylor first implemented the bitcoin treasury model in the middle of 2020—investing $250 million in bitcoin at a time when most CFOs were hoarding cash and trying not to panic—it was truly bold.

The logic appeared to be circular in the most seductive way as the price of bitcoin increased and Strategy’s stock rose in tandem: buy bitcoin, watch stock rise, sell stock, buy more bitcoin. By late 2025, more than a hundred publicly traded companies had amassed over $114 billion in bitcoin. Fuel was added by the Trump administration’s generally pro-crypto stance. It seemed to be the only trade that was important for a while.

The fundamental question of what a company is worth when its main asset is something that can drop 30% in a quarter and has no earnings attached tends to get lost in the excitement of a momentum cycle. The head of the University of Southampton’s Centre for Digital Finance, Larisa Yarovaya, has been thoughtfully and openly posing this query. Her worry is not that bitcoin is worthless, but rather that the corporate treasury model, when used so widely and with so much leverage, creates fragility that isn’t apparent until prices start to move in the wrong direction. The shine usually disappears all at once.

It’s difficult to ignore concurrent events. The money rotating out of these positions must go somewhere as cryptocurrency prices decline in early April 2026. Bitcoin is down, Ether is down 1.1%, and Solana is down 2.4%. Predictably, some of it is returning to the companies that value investors have been subtly supporting throughout the hype: companies with actual earnings, manageable debt, and the unglamorous but enduring quality of being worth what they are priced at. This is not a significant reversal. The market is gradually straightening its back after years of excessively favoring narrative over fundamentals; it’s more akin to a slow correction of posture.

Value investing has been deemed obsolete so frequently that the statement itself has evolved into a sort of trustworthy contrarian indicator. It was meant to end with the 2008 financial crisis and be replaced by asset inflation driven by central banks that rewarded momentum regardless of underlying quality. The obituaries became even more self-assured following the tech boom of 2020–2021.

Sitting in Omaha with his Berkshire Hathaway portfolio full of consumer staples and insurance companies, Warren Buffett was often referred to as a relic, thoughtful and admirable, but out of step with how markets actually functioned these days. That characterization has a tendency to age poorly, and it is aging poorly once more.

It’s possible that the rotation back toward value is still in its early phases and that the momentum could be momentarily reversed once more by another cryptocurrency surge brought on by a macroeconomic change or regulatory approval. Seldom are markets as neat as the stories we construct about them. However, 2026 is structurally different. Interest rates are no longer zero. There is a cost to capital. When money has a cost, investors who lend money to those companies begin to ask more difficult questions about liquidity and risk concentration, which significantly alters the calculus around holding a volatile, yield-free asset on a corporate balance sheet.

The businesses with the most intriguing stories are not the ones that appear to be in the best position at the moment. They have the clearest customer relationships, the most defendable earnings, and the least exposure to the kind of reflexive enthusiasm that initially propelled the adoption of cryptocurrency treasury. It’s a boring sentence to write. Observing the market in early April 2026, it’s also becoming more and more accurate. It’s possible that the investors who were made to feel outdated for two years aren’t boasting. However, it’s likely that they are sleeping a bit better.