UBS ramped its call option exposure on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) more than 24-fold in a single quarter. The move shows up in a Q2 13F filing covering positions held as of June 30.
At quarter-end, calls covered 1.95 million underlying IBIT shares. Three months earlier that number was 80,000. The Swiss bank also nudged its direct IBIT holdings up roughly 12% to 407,890 shares, a position worth about $13.6 million. UBS manages over $7 trillion in assets. Puts went the opposite direction. Exposure there dropped 53%, sliding to 143,300 underlying shares from 303,300 at the close of March.
Woofun AI crunched the filing and published its analysis on Moomoo. The call position carried a notional underlying value near $64.92 million as of June 30. Puts sat at roughly $4.77 million. Important caveat: those numbers reflect the value of the shares the options reference, not the premiums UBS actually paid. The 13F does not capture that distinction.
Here is where the filing falls short. It omits strike prices and expirations, making it impossible to pin down UBS’s net directional exposure from the document alone. The disclosure also leaves open whether the call buildup reflects proprietary positioning, client initiatives, dealer hedging, or market-making activity. And a 13F aggregates positions across UBS subsidiary entities. It does not report a single bank balance-sheet stake.
Market commentary has not been so cautious. Woofun AI wrote in its Moomoo analysis that reducing puts while expanding calls “outlines UBS Group’s strengthened bullish stance.” That interpretation skips over what the bank has not disclosed. Whether the options are exchange-listed or over-the-counter. Who the counterparties are. Whether the positions hedge other exposure elsewhere in UBS’s book. Traders, as ever, disagree.
The direct IBIT stake tells a quieter story. UBS held 548,614 IBIT shares at the end of 2025. By June that figure stood at 407,890, a 26% decline from the Q4 level even after the Q2 add. The bank trimmed in Q1. It bought back partially in Q2. It never recovered the year-end high.
A separate number has been making the rounds in market commentary: a roughly 230% increase in UBS’s total IBIT holdings. Woofun AI flagged that figure as a misreading. It conflates spot shares with call and put option underlying shares into one aggregate. The 13F options data reports nominal underlying share counts, not cash deployed. It does not capture a firm’s entire derivatives portfolio either.
UBS has been moving toward crypto client services for a while now. Back in January, CoinDesk reported the bank was preparing to offer select private banking clients in Switzerland access to bitcoin and ether trading. The Q2 filing does not say whether that initiative drove the IBIT options increase. UBS has not publicly tied the two together.
For a bank this large, the absolute numbers are small. The $13.6 million direct IBIT position is a fraction of a fraction of $7 trillion in assets under management. Even the $64.92 million notional call exposure barely registers against the broader trading book. The signal is directional. It is not material.
What the filing shows clearly enough is that UBS moved meaningfully along the options curve this quarter. More calls. Fewer puts. Spot holdings nudged higher. What it does not show is what that positioning is for. A 13F is a snapshot, not a thesis. This one does not name one either.
