Strategy Is Back With 811 BTC, but $208M Went to Its Own Stock

Strategy's week off is over. The largest corporate bitcoin holder bought 811 BTC for $65.5 million between Oct. 26 and Nov. 1, at an average of $80,846 per coin, according to a Form 8-K filed Monday with the SEC.

That brings its stack to 849,327 BTC, bought for $64.08 billion at an average of $75,451. With bitcoin near $77,400 on Monday, per CoinGecko, the holding is worth about $65.8 billion, roughly $1.7 billion above cost. This week's coins were bought above Monday's price, so that batch starts slightly underwater. Timing the market is hard, even for a company built around it.

Follow the cash and the picture gets more interesting. Strategy sold 1,178,552 common shares through its at-the-market program, which lets a company sell new stock into the market a little at a time. That raised $164.0 million. Only $65.5 million went to bitcoin. The other $98.5 million went to a cash pile the company keeps for general use.

It then spent $208.2 million of that cash buying back 2,092,035 shares of STRC (its variable-rate preferred stock). Preferred stock pays a set dividend and ranks ahead of common shares. Buying it back shrinks the dividend bill the company owes each month. The filing says $748.6 million of preferred buyback room remains.

Separately, Strategy keeps a dollar reserve to cover preferred dividends and debt interest. It used $43.4 million of that reserve for dividends during the week, leaving $4.79 billion. General-purpose cash ended the week at $132.7 million.

So the headline buy was the smaller number. More money went into retiring preferred stock than into bitcoin.

In our opinion: Strategy is running two jobs now, bitcoin buyer and manager of its own dividend obligations, and this week the second job got the bigger budget. That is not a retreat from bitcoin, but it shows the company weighing what its preferred stock costs against what another coin is worth. Watch next Monday's filing for whether the buyback keeps outpacing the bitcoin buys.