One of Canada’s largest institutional investors just found its way into Bitcoin, without actually buying any Bitcoin.
Alberta Investment Management Corporation, the firm that manages pension and endowment assets for the province of Alberta, disclosed a position of 1.38 million shares in Strategy Inc., the company formerly known as MicroStrategy. The purchase, made during the first quarter of 2026 and revealed through a 13F filing, cost AIMCo approximately $172.5 million at roughly $125 per share.
By the time the filing hit on April 30, those shares were worth about $219 million. By early May, the valuation had climbed to approximately $241 million. That’s an unrealized gain of around $69 million.
Why Strategy and why now
Strategy is the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin treasury assets on the planet. Buying MSTR stock is a bet on Bitcoin with a corporate wrapper around it.
That wrapper matters enormously for institutions like AIMCo. Canadian provincial asset managers operate under strict regulatory frameworks that make direct cryptocurrency holdings complicated, if not outright prohibited. Buying shares of a Nasdaq-listed company that happens to sit on a massive pile of Bitcoin is a regulatory-appropriate method for gaining indirect exposure.
AIMCo manages a portfolio worth somewhere between $142 billion and $195 billion across Alberta’s pension plans, endowments, and government funds. This is the first reported Bitcoin-linked exposure by any Canadian provincial entity through Strategy shares.
A second chance at a first impression
AIMCo previously held a smaller position in MSTR, roughly 200,000 shares, between 2019 and mid-2020. It sold that stake in September 2020, right around the time Michael Saylor was pivoting the company’s entire treasury strategy toward Bitcoin.
The new purchase of 1.38 million shares, nearly seven times the size of the old position, reads like a correction of that earlier call. The at-cost price of roughly $125 per share suggests AIMCo was building this position methodically across the quarter rather than making a single large block trade.
What this means for investors
There are risks. Strategy’s stock price remains tightly correlated to Bitcoin, which means AIMCo’s unrealized gains could evaporate during a crypto downturn just as quickly as they materialized. The leveraged nature of MSTR’s Bitcoin exposure cuts both ways. A sharp Bitcoin correction wouldn’t just erase gains; it could push the stock well below AIMCo’s cost basis.