Original author: Wu said blockchain

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Thomas Jong Lee, often referred to as Tom Lee, is a well-known American stock market strategist, research director and financial commentator.

He was born in Westland, Michigan, USA. He is the third child of a Korean immigrant family. His father is a psychiatrist and his mother transformed from a housewife to a Subway chain store operator. Lee then entered the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in finance and accounting. According to the Wall Street Journal in January 2021, Lee often cooks to relax after a busy day, and especially likes to try to recreate Korean dishes made by his mother. He is low-key and scholarly in style. When facing critics, he rarely refutes, but 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 started his Wall Street career in the 1990s, working at Kidder Peabody and Salomon Smith Barney. He joined JPMorgan Chase in 1999 and served as the bank's chief equity strategist from 2007 until his departure in 2014. During his tenure, he attracted media attention for his optimistic market views, but was also involved in industry turmoil due to his insistence on critical research.

In 2002, Lee, as a telecom analyst at JPMorgan Chase, published a research report on wireless operator Nextel, questioning whether its accounting treatment of customer churn and bad debt reserves truly reflected the actual situation. On the day the report was released, Nextel's stock price briefly fell 8%, and then the company's top management strongly fought back. The CFO and general counsel called JPMorgan Chase's research director and legal department respectively, accusing Lee of using misleading assumptions and even suspected that he had leaked some of the content to specific investors before the report was officially released. JPMorgan Chase then launched a two-week internal investigation, reviewing his emails and call records, and finally confirmed that Lee had no misconduct. The Wall Street Journal reported the incident under the title "Unhappy Firm Bites Back", triggering widespread discussion about the independence of Wall Street analysts. This incident became a representative conflict case in Lee's career, and also established his research style of insisting on data-oriented and not catering to the pressure of the market and investment bank clients.

In 2014, Lee co-founded the independent research institution Fundstrat Global Advisors and served as the head of research, successfully transforming from a traditional investment bank strategist to the leader of an independent research institution. He was one of the first Wall Street strategists to include Bitcoin in the mainstream valuation system. In 2017, Lee published a report titled "A framework for valuing bitcoin as a substitute for gold", which first proposed that Bitcoin has the potential to partially replace gold as a store of value. The framework is based on three key parameters: the average annual growth rate of the US base money supply (about 6.5%), the multiple of the value of alternative assets such as gold to the total amount of money (the value in the model is about 400%), and the potential market share of Bitcoin in this alternative value system (the model benchmark is 5%). According to this valuation model, the theoretical value center of Bitcoin in 2022 is US$20,300, and the sensitivity analysis shows that the valuation range is between US$12,000 and US$55,000. Lee pointed out in the report that as the total market value of crypto assets exceeds US$500 billion, central banks and institutional investors may include them in foreign exchange reserves and asset allocation considerations.

In the same year, Lee also introduced his short-term valuation model on Business Insider. Based on Metcalfe's law (that is, the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of users), the number of independent Bitcoin addresses was used as the user proxy, multiplied by the average daily transaction volume of each user, and then regression analysis was performed. The model can explain about 94% of Bitcoin price changes since 2013.

Lee's research style emphasizes data-driven and historical analogies, and he is particularly good at medium- and long-term trend forecasting. When the epidemic caused a global market crash in March 2020, Lee was one of the first strategists to predict a "V-shaped rebound" and firmly advised investors to add positions while prices were low. In May 2021, when Bitcoin rebounded briefly after a sharp correction from a high of $60,000 to the $30,000 range, Lee was interviewed by CNBC's "TechCheck" program and reiterated his view, originally put forward in December 2020, that Bitcoin would break through $100,000 by the end of the year. He said: "Bitcoin is extremely volatile by nature, but it is this volatility that brings return opportunities." "Even if Bitcoin is now in the cold palace, I still think it can break through $100,000 by the end of the year." In addition, as early as 2019, Lee suggested on the CNBC show that ordinary investors should allocate 1% to 2% of their assets to Bitcoin. The host on the scene was surprised to respond that "That sounds kind of crazy". The clip was then widely circulated and became a representative moment of his insistence on Bitcoin.

In December 2023, Lee proposed in Fundstrat's annual outlook that the S&P 500 will rise to 5,200 points in 2024, when the index is still around 4,600; this goal was achieved ahead of schedule in mid-2024. Later, he further stated in Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast that the S&P 500 is expected to reach 15,000 points by 2030, benefiting from corporate profit growth, valuation reassessment and technological innovation, and reiterated that Bitcoin's long-term potential valuation can reach millions of dollars if wallet adoption continues to grow.

Lee has also experienced critical misjudgments in his career. In the 1990s, as an analyst in the wireless communications industry, he was optimistic about the rapid growth of the field, but after the Internet bubble burst, the related sectors fell sharply. He also underestimated the systemic risk of the real estate market before the 2008 financial crisis, and later admitted that this was one of the biggest lessons he learned - that the stock market trend is highly dependent on the confidence of the credit market. He said in an interview: "Once the credit market loses confidence, no financial market can survive on its own." These setbacks prompted him to pay more attention to cyclical indicators and capital flow structure in the future, and established his research style based on historical data.

Lee has been active in mainstream financial programs such as CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNN for a long time. He has been a special commentator and market strategy analyst for CNBC's "Fast Money", "TechCheck", "Halftime Report" and "Closing Bell" programs for many years. He has attracted the attention of investors for his independent views and successful prediction of macro market trends many times. During the sharp decline of US stocks in 2022, Lee insisted on his bullish judgment and put forward the view that the market had bottomed out in the middle of the year, which was also confirmed by subsequent trends. Therefore, he was called the representative of the contrarian optimism in the "Wall of Worry".

Currently, Tom Lee also serves as an investment strategy advisor for NewEdge Wealth, continuing to express cutting-edge views at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets.

Strategic layout: Taking charge of BitMine and advancing the Ethereum financial model

In June 2025, Lee was appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors of BitMine Immersion Technologies (NASDAQ: BMNR) and began to participate in the company's strategic transformation from traditional mining to enterprise-level Ethereum (ETH) reserve structure. BitMine is a digital asset infrastructure company headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. It initially focused on Bitcoin mining, using immersion cooling technology to improve energy efficiency and computing power stability, and is committed to building a high-performance, low-cost blockchain computing platform.

In the same month of the appointment, the company completed a PIPE private placement financing, issuing 55,555,556 shares of common stock and related securities at a price of US$4.50 per share, raising US$250 million. It then submitted an S-3 ASR automatic registration statement and launched an ATM (at-market additional offering) plan of no more than US$2 billion, with Cantor Fitzgerald and ThinkEquity acting as sales agents. The funds will be used to build the ETH treasury reserve.

As of mid-July, the company disclosed that its total ETH holdings reached 300,657 with a market value of more than $1 billion, including about 60,000 in-the-money options backed by $200 million in cash. Lee said the company is moving towards its goal of "acquiring and staking 5% of the total supply of Ethereum."

Subsequently, Founders Fund disclosed that it held a 9.1% stake in BMNR. ARK Invest also purchased 4,773,444 shares of BMNR through an over-the-counter agreement, with a transaction value of approximately US$182 million, and announced that all of them would be converted into ETH reserves to support the company's strategy.

In late July, BMNR launched option trading, and the company further improved stock liquidity. The latest disclosure shows that BitMine's ETH holdings have increased to 566,776, with a market value of more than US$2 billion, nearly 8 times the initial amount of PIPE, making it one of the listed companies with the largest number of ETH in the world.

Lee: Stablecoins drive Ethereum to become the first choice for institutions

In a recent interview with Amit Kukreja and CoinDesk, Tom Lee expressed his firm bullishness on the Ethereum ecosystem, especially the trend of stablecoins and tokenization of real-world assets (RWA). He pointed out that the rise of stablecoins constitutes a "ChatGPT moment in crypto", and the global stablecoin market value has exceeded US$250 billion, of which more than 50% of issuance and about 30% of gas fees occur on the Ethereum network. With stablecoins gaining support from the US Treasury and Wall Street, Ethereum is gradually becoming a key infrastructure connecting crypto and traditional finance.

Lee, chairman of BitMine’s board of directors, pointed out that Ethereum-based public companies have five structural advantages over ETFs or on-chain custody models:

1. When the stock price is higher than the net assets, ETH can be purchased by issuing additional shares to achieve a reflexive increase in the net assets per share (NAV);

2. The volatility can be hedged by issuing convertible bonds, selling options and other tools, thus achieving low-cost or even zero-cost position building while reducing financing costs;

3. Possess the ability to acquire other on-chain financial companies to further amplify NAV leverage;

4. It can expand businesses such as ETH staking, DeFi income, and on-chain infrastructure to build a sustainable source of cash flow;

5. Once its ETH holdings occupy a core position in the on-chain ecosystem, or become a key node in the stablecoin payment and clearing network, it will have a status similar to a "structural subscription right" (sovereign put) and may become a strategic asset that financial institutions acquire first.

Lee emphasized that as platforms such as Robinhood launch stock tokenization services through Ethereum Layer 2, more and more institutions are beginning to embrace compliant and scalable blockchain platforms, and Ethereum is currently the only main chain that meets regulatory adaptability, ecological maturity and scale effects.

In an interview with CoinDesk, he concluded: "Stablecoins have enabled the crypto industry to achieve an explosion similar to ChatGPT. Wall Street is looking for a chain that can carry real assets and comply with regulations, and Ethereum is becoming that intersection." Fundstrat analysts set ETH's short-term technical target at $4,000 and believe that its fair value at the end of the year can reach $10,000 to $15,000. Lee said: "Allocating ETH at the current price is an effective way for corporate finances to achieve 10 times the potential."