Strategy buys 267 BTC but spends $193M buying back STRC

Michael Saylor's Strategy, the largest publicly traded corporate holder of bitcoin, bought another 267 BTC for roughly $22.1 million last week, but spent almost nine times that amount buying back its own preferred stock. The figures come from a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, as reported by Cointelegraph.

The bitcoin purchase

• Amount: 267 BTC, bought between Oct. 12 and Oct. 16.
• Average price: about $82,900 per bitcoin.
• Total holdings: 848,517 BTC, acquired for $64.02 billion in total.
• Funding: about $22 million raised by selling 140,872 shares of its common stock (MSTR).

The week before, ending Oct. 9, Strategy bought 250 BTC for $21.5 million, so the company has kept its weekly buying going, just in small amounts by its own standards.

The bigger number: STRC buybacks

Strategy also repurchased 1.94 million shares of Stretch (STRC), one of its preferred stocks, for $193.1 million, paid out of existing cash. That follows $192.4 million of STRC buybacks the previous week. STRC has been trading below its $100 reference price, which we covered when Strategy moved to daily STRC dividends.

The board also lifted the authorization for repurchasing its preferred "digital credit" securities to $3 billion from $2 billion, leaving $1.16 billion still available as of Sunday. Strategy reported a $4.83 billion US dollar reserve set aside for preferred dividends and debt interest, plus $447.3 million in separate cash.

How the market reacted

MSTR shares were up more than 2.5% in premarket trading before Monday's Nasdaq open, after closing Friday down about 9.6% at $138.83. The company also faces a looming index question: MSCI is reviewing how it treats firms like Strategy, as we explained in our piece on the MSCI exclusion risk.

Why it matters

Strategy is a leveraged bet on bitcoin that trades on the stock market, an alternative some investors weigh against holding the coin itself (see our guide on bitcoin ETFs vs buying bitcoin). This week's numbers show where its money is going right now: supporting its preferred stock rather than adding large amounts of BTC.