Strategy Buys 267 BTC for $22.1M, Expands STRC Buyback to $3B

Strategy bought 267 BTC for $22.1 million between October 12 and 18 and repurchased $193.1 million of its STRC preferred stock, according to an SEC filing published Monday.

The Bitcoin treasury firm paid an average of $82,900 per coin, including fees. That's down from $86,194 a coin for the 250 BTC it bought the prior week, as Decrypt reported. Strategy now holds 848,517 BTC, acquired for a total of $64.02 billion at an average of $75,446 per coin.

How did Strategy fund the purchases?

The company raised $22 million by selling 140,872 shares of MSTR common stock through its at-the-market offering program, plus $0.1 million of cash. It sold no preferred stock during the week.

The STRC buyback — 1,938,780 shares of the variable-rate Stretch preferred stock — came from what Strategy calls USD Cash, the pool set aside for general purposes including Bitcoin purchases. The company confirmed the transactions on X on October 19, adding that it held $5.3 billion in USD assets as of October 18.

Strategy's board also raised the total authorized under its digital credit securities repurchase program, which covers its preferred stock, to $3 billion from $2 billion. Last week's buyback had left $354.8 million in the program; after this week's purchases and the cap increase, $1.16 billion remained available as of October 18. A separate program to buy back MSTR common stock has $1 billion left.

The company also drew $45.5 million from its USD Reserve — the pool meant to cover preferred dividends and debt interest — to pay dividends. As of October 18, the reserve held $4.83 billion and USD Cash held $447.3 million, down from $4.88 billion and $640.5 million a week earlier.

Why does the STRC buyback matter?

The repurchase extends a run of weekly buybacks of the preferred security. Strategy bought back $192.4 million of STRC the previous week and $176 million the week before that, a period in which it also bought $29 million in Bitcoin and posted a $21 billion third-quarter gain. In the last week of September, it repurchased $151.7 million of STRC as its holdings reached a then-record 847,666 BTC.

The buybacks let the company retire preferred obligations below issuance value while shrinking the float — a capital-allocation move that competes directly with Bitcoin accumulation for the same cash pool. The latest Bitcoin purchase, $22.1 million, is in line with the prior week's $21.5 million buy but a fraction of the $142.7 million Strategy spent on Bitcoin in the last week of September.

Co-founder Michael Saylor had flagged the purchase on Sunday, writing on X: "We found room for more orange."

What does the MSCI rule change mean?

The bigger overhang is index membership. On October 15, MSCI finalized a rule that treats "non-operating companies" — those whose balance sheets are dominated by a single asset — as ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes, effective from the close of November 30.

MSCI will publish the list of affected companies on November 11. Removal would force funds that track the indexes to sell the affected shares. Saylor had urged MSCI to drop what he called a "discriminatory" rule.

For a company whose equity issuance machine depends on demand for MSTR stock, index-driven forced selling is an operational risk no buyback cap can fully offset. The November 11 list will tell investors how much of that risk is real.