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Thomas Jong Lee, often referred to as Tom Lee, is a well-known U.S. stock market strategist, research director, and financial commentator.
Born in Westland, Michigan, to a Korean immigrant family as the third child, his father was a psychiatrist, and his mother transitioned from a housewife to a Subway chain store operator. Lee later attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in finance and accounting. According to a January 2021 Wall Street Journal report, Lee often cooks to relax after a busy day, particularly enjoying recreating Korean dishes his mother used to make. He is low-key, scholarly in style, rarely retorts to critics, and instead tries to respond with data. In an interview, he once said, "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 in 1999 and served as the firm'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 involved in industry controversies due to his commitment to critical research.
In 2002, as a JPMorgan telecommunications analyst, Lee released a research report questioning Nextel's customer churn rate and bad debt provision accounting. On the day of the report's release, Nextel's stock price briefly dropped 8%, followed by a strong rebuttal from the company's top executives. The CFO and general counsel contacted JPMorgan's research management and legal department, accusing Lee of using misleading assumptions and suspecting he had leaked parts of the report to specific investors before its official publication. JPMorgan conducted a two-week internal investigation, reviewing emails and call records, ultimately confirming no misconduct by Lee. The Wall Street Journal reported this under the headline "Unhappy Firm Bites Back," sparking widespread discussion about Wall Street analysts' independence. This incident became a representative conflict in Lee's career, establishing his research style of adhering to data-driven insights and resisting pressure from market and investment bank clients.
In 2014, Lee co-founded the independent research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors and became its research director, successfully transitioning from a traditional investment bank strategist to an independent research institution leader. He was one of the first Wall Street strategists to incorporate Bitcoin into mainstream valuation systems. In 2017, Lee released a report titled "A framework for valuing bitcoin as a substitute for gold," first proposing Bitcoin's potential to partially replace gold as a store of value. The framework was built on three key parameters: the average annual growth of U.S. base money supply (around 6.5%), the multiple of alternative asset values to total monetary supply (approximately 400% in the model), and Bitcoin's potential market share in this alternative value system (baseline model at 5%). According to this valuation model, Bitcoin's theoretical value center in 2022 was $20,300, with sensitivity analysis showing a range between $12,000 and $55,000. Lee noted that as the total crypto asset market value exceeded $500 billion, central banks and institutional investors might consider it for 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 (network value is proportional to the square of user numbers). Using the number of unique Bitcoin addresses as a user proxy and multiplying by average daily transaction volume per user, the model could explain approximately 94% of Bitcoin price changes since 2013.
Lee's research style emphasizes data-driven analysis and historical analogies, particularly excelling in medium to long-term trend predictions. During the global market crash caused by the pandemic in March 2020, Lee was one of the earliest strategists to predict a "V-shaped recovery," firmly advising investors to buy the dip. In May 2021, after Bitcoin dramatically dropped from its $60,000 high to the $30,000 range and briefly rebounded, Lee reaffirmed his original December 2020 view in a CNBC 'TechCheck' interview that Bitcoin would break $100,000 by year-end. He stated, "Bitcoin is inherently extremely volatile, but it's this volatility that brings return opportunities" and "Even if Bitcoin is now in the cold palace, I still believe it can break $100,000 by year-end". Additionally, as early as 2019, Lee suggested on CNBC that ordinary investors allocate 1-2% of assets to Bitcoin, with the host surprisingly responding, "That sounds kind of crazy" - a segment that widely circulated as representative of his Bitcoin stance.
In December 2023, Lee projected the S&P 500 would rise to 5,200 in 2024 when the index was still around 4,600 - a target achieved by mid-2024. He further stated in a Bloomberg 'Odd Lots' podcast that the S&P 500 could reach 15,000 by 2030, benefiting from corporate earnings growth, valuation reassessment, and technological innovation. He reiterated that Bitcoin's long-term potential valuation could reach millions of dollars with continued wallet adoption.
In his career, Lee also experienced key judgment errors. In the 1990s, as a wireless communication industry analyst, he was optimistic about the sector's high growth, but the segment significantly declined after the internet bubble burst. Before the 2008 financial crisis, he also underestimated the systemic risks in the real estate market, later candidly admitting this was one of his greatest lessons - that market trends are highly dependent on credit market confidence. He stated in an interview: "Once the credit market loses confidence, no financial market can remain unscathed." These setbacks prompted him to pay more attention to cyclical indicators and fund flow structures, establishing his research style anchored in historical data.
Lee has been actively involved in mainstream financial programs like 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'. He has gained investor attention for maintaining independent views and successfully predicting macro market trends. During the significant U.S. stock market decline in 2022, Lee maintained a bullish stance and proposed that the market had bottomed out mid-year, a prediction later confirmed, earning him the reputation of a contrarian optimist in the "Wall of Worry".
Currently, Tom Lee also serves as an investment strategy advisor at NewEdge Wealth, continuing to provide cutting-edge perspectives at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets.
Strategic Layout: Leading BitMine and Advancing Ethereum Fiscal Model
In June 2025, Lee was appointed as the board chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies (NASDAQ: BMNR), beginning to participate in the company's strategic transformation from traditional mining to enterprise-level Ethereum (ETH) reserve structure. BitMine is a digital asset infrastructure enterprise headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, initially focusing on Bitcoin mining, using immersion cooling technology to enhance energy efficiency and computing power stability, aiming to build a high-performance, low-cost blockchain computing platform.
In the same month, the company completed a PIPE private placement, issuing 55,555,556 common shares and related securities at $4.50 per share, raising $250 million, and subsequently submitted an S-3ASR automatic registration statement, initiating an ATM (at-the-market) plan of up to $2 billion, with Cantor Fitzgerald and ThinkEquity serving as sales agents, with funds to be used for building ETH fiscal reserves.
As of mid-July, the company disclosed its total ETH holdings reached 300,657 tokens, 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 advancing towards the goal of "acquiring and staking 5% of Ethereum's total supply".
Subsequently, Founders Fund disclosed holding 9.1% of BMNR's stock, and ARK Invest also purchased 4,773,444 BMNR shares through an over-the-counter agreement, with a transaction amount of approximately $182 million, and announced that they would convert all shares into ETH reserves to support the company's strategy.
In late July, BMNR initiated options trading, further enhancing the company's stock liquidity. The latest disclosure shows that BitMine's ETH holdings increased to 566,776 tokens, with a market value exceeding $2 billion, nearly 8 times the initial PIPE amount, making it one of the global listed companies with the largest ETH holdings.
Lee: Stablecoins Drive Ethereum to Become Institutional Preferred Choice
In a recent interview with Amit Kukreja and CoinDesk, Tom Lee expressed his strong confidence in the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly the trends of stablecoins and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. He noted that the rise of stablecoins constitutes a "ChatGPT moment" in the crypto field, with global stablecoin market capitalization exceeding $250 billion, over 50% of issuance and approximately 30% of gas fees occurring 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 the chairman of BitMine's board, Lee pointed out that Ethereum fiscal listed companies have five structural advantages compared to ETFs or on-chain custody models:
1. Can purchase ETH by issuing shares when stock price is above net asset value, achieving a reflexive increase in net asset value (NAV) per share;
2. Can hedge volatility through convertible bonds, option sales, and other tools, reducing financing costs and achieving low-cost or even zero-cost positioning;
3. Ability to acquire other on-chain fiscal companies, further amplifying NAV leverage;
4. Can expand into ETH staking, DeFi yields, on-chain infrastructure, and other businesses to build sustainable cash flow sources;
5. Once ETH holdings occupy a core position in the on-chain ecosystem or become a key node in stablecoin payment and clearing networks, it may acquire a status similar to a "sovereign put", potentially becoming a strategic asset prioritized by financial institutions.
Lee emphasized that as platforms like Robinhood launch stock tokenization services through Ethereum Layer 2, more institutions are embracing compliant, scalable blockchain platforms, with Ethereum currently being the only mainchain meeting regulatory adaptability, ecosystem maturity, and scale effects.
In the CoinDesk interview, he concluded: "Stablecoins have completed a breakthrough in the crypto industry similar to ChatGPT. Wall Street is seeking a chain that can carry real-world assets while complying with regulations, and Ethereum is becoming that convergence point." Fundstrat analysts set ETH's short-term technical target at $4,000, believing its year-end fair value could reach $10,000 to $15,000. Lee stated: "Configuring ETH at current prices is an effective path for corporate finance to obtain 10x potential."
