Michael Saylor's Strategy bought 950 Bitcoin (BTC) last week, ending a two-week pause, but put more than twice as much cash into buying back its STRC preferred stock.
Key Points:
- Strategy paid $75.7 million for 950 BTC, lifting its holdings to 846,000 coins.
- It spent $174 million repurchasing about 1.77 million STRC preferred shares in the same week.
- Both deals were funded from cash, and the company sold no shares to replenish it.
Strategy Bitcoin Purchase
Strategy disclosed the purchase in a Sept. 21 filing, saying it paid $75.7 million, or $79,670 per coin including fees, for Bitcoin bought between Sept. 14 and Sept. 20. The acquisition lifted its holdings to 846,000 BTC, which the company bought for $63.80 billion in total at an average cost of $75,416 per coin. Strategy sold no shares to pay for it.
Over the same week, the company repurchased 1,771,238 STRC shares for $174 million, leaving $875.1 million available under its program for buying back preferred stock. Its other preferred series and its common stock saw no buybacks.
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Saylor STRC Buyback
The buyback cost $98.3 million more than the week's Bitcoin spending, and Strategy paid for both deals from its USD Cash account rather than through new stock sales. That account is shrinking. USD Cash fell nearly 20% to $1.05 billion from $1.30 billion a week earlier, while a separate reserve set aside for dividends and debt interest dipped to $5.04 billion from $5.10 billion.
Management has argued that buying STRC below its $100 stated amount lets the company retire the stock at a discount while cutting the dividends it owes in the future.
STRC traded at $98.85 in Monday premarket trading, and Strategy's common shares rose 7.4% to $165.20, with Bitcoin near $84,925 at the time. The holdings carried an unrealized gain of about $8.05 billion.
Strategy Buying Pause
The latest purchase ended two straight weeks in which Strategy steered its deployable cash toward STRC rather than Bitcoin. It spent $176.3 million on the preferred shares in the week ended Sept. 7, when its board doubled the buyback program to $2 billion, and another $139.3 million the following week. Its Bitcoin count held at 845,050 throughout.
The 950 new coins brought Strategy back to 846,000 BTC, the same total it reported at the end of the second quarter before it sold some Bitcoin in July and August. Its previous purchase came in late August, when it bought 4,603 BTC for $369.7 million with money raised from common stock sales.
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