MicroStrategy, renamed Strategy in 2025, offloaded 6,948 bitcoin at a weighted average near $62,200 between June and August, then bought 4,603 back last week at $80,318 apiece. Chief executive Phong Le stands by the round trip and calls it the right trade at each point in time. The company now holds 845,050 BTC at an average cost of $75,412.
Key Takeaways
- 6,948 BTC sold near $62,200, then 4,603 BTC bought back at $80,318
- Net debt taken from roughly $7B to zero across a ten-week buying pause
- Bernstein keeps Outperform but cuts its target from $450 to $350
A $62,200 Exit to Cover the STRC Preferred Dividends
The sequence has two legs. Across June, July and August the company let go of 6,948 bitcoin in a $60,000 to $65,000 band, working out to a weighted average around $62,200. The cash went to servicing dividends on the STRC preferred shares.
That funding route was already in use earlier in the summer. In early August the firm had sold 1,638 BTC to cover the same preferred dividends, in a market that gave it far less room than the one it faces now. What changed this time is the cumulative size, and above all what came next.
Between August 24 and August 30, the company acquired 4,603 bitcoin for $369.7 million, an average of $80,318 per coin. The gap against the exit price is impossible to miss. Buying back above where you sold is, on its face, the exact opposite of what markets reward.
Phong Le pushes back on the framing by pointing at scale. The 6,948 coins amount to under 1% of the stack, a share he calls minuscule next to the 845,050 BTC now on the balance sheet. That reserve carries an aggregate purchase price of $63.73 billion and a market value close to $65 billion at current levels.
Holdings are up roughly 30% year to date, sales included. Total assets at MicroStrategy sit near $72 billion, of which about $7 billion is dollar cash.
Timing did most of the damage. The selling stretched over three months while bitcoin sat pinned below its highs, and the buying compressed into one late-August week that caught a bounce. Selling slowly into a flat tape and buying fast into a rising one produces an adverse spread almost by construction.
Cost of Capital, Not the Bitcoin Price, Drives the Calls
The defense the chief executive offers moves the argument onto different ground entirely. He argues the company does not decide on bitcoin by looking at bitcoin, but by looking at what capital costs to raise and what return it expects once deployed.
That logic explains the ten-week gap between the two legs. Over that stretch the firm took net debt from about $7 billion down to zero and built a cash buffer of similar size. A cleaner balance sheet makes MSTR share issuance cheaper, and it is exactly that issuance that funded the August purchase.
The purchase itself is laid out in the Form 8-K filed with the SEC on August 31, which confirms proceeds from stock sales paid for the 4,603 coins. Selling equity at a premium to buy the underlying asset remains the core machine.
Le now describes the business as a two-way capital management company, one that buys and sells bitcoin, common stock and preferred paper depending on the window. The wording formally buries permanent accumulation, a turn Michael Saylor set in motion back in May when he walked away from the never-sell doctrine.
Whether the round trip was costly depends on the horizon you price it over. On a twelve-month view, an $18,000 spread per coin is real money. Over the life of the balance sheet, permanent access to cheap capital outweighs the entry point on any single tranche.
One thing to notice is what this does to the headline cost basis. The $75,412 average blends tranches bought under wildly different financing conditions, which makes it a weak anchor. The number that actually matters is the spread between the market capitalization of MicroStrategy and the market value of the reserve, because that spread decides whether each new share issue adds or destroys bitcoin per share.
The pattern is not new either. It ran in June, when the firm bought 1,550 bitcoin right after selling just 32 coins, on an even tighter window. A heavier precedent landed in July with a $216M bitcoin sale aimed at the same dividend bill. Three episodes in four months read as a funding routine rather than a one-off reaction to a market accident.
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Bernstein Trims Its Target to $350 as MSTR Sheds 6.1%
Markets did not buy the MicroStrategy explanation on the day. MSTR closed September 1 at $124.88, down 6.1% on the session, while bitcoin traded near $77,000 and slipped 1.1% over twenty-four hours.
Bernstein keeps its Outperform rating but takes the price target from $450 down to $350, while holding a $150,000 bitcoin forecast for mid-2027. The cut lands on the premium the vehicle earns, not on the asset thesis underneath it.
That distinction is worth holding onto. An investor who believes in $150,000 bitcoin does not automatically want to own it through this wrapper, because the wrapper comes with a balance sheet, a preferred dividend obligation and an issuance policy nobody outside the company controls. The premium is payment for that extra risk, and it compresses whenever the capital management story gets harder to follow.
Le rules out further sales in the near term. He flags a heavy bull market ahead and casts the firm as a buyer at $80,000, then $90,000 and $100,000, and up to $130,000 on a fresh all-time high. He goes further and floats a $260,000 scenario that would make those purchases look cheap in hindsight.
The structural constraint sits elsewhere. As long as preferred dividends have to be paid in cash, the bitcoin reserve stays an adjustment variable the company can reach for, whatever the messaging says. Index pressure now stacks on top, since MSCI opened a process to drop the stock from its benchmarks.
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