The strategy takes a break from buying bitcoin.
Michael Saylor said Sunday that the company would not add to its bitcoin holdings this week, pausing its regular buying program ahead of Tuesday’s first-quarter earnings.
“No purchases this week. Back to work next week,” Saylor wrote on X.
The break is only the second this year for Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, which has transformed itself into the largest publicly traded bitcoin treasury company and one of the most closely watched proxies for institutional BTC exposure. The company most recently skipped a weekly purchase in the week of March 23 to March 29.
The strategy currently has 818,334 BTC, equivalent to nearly 3.9% of bitcoin’s fixed 21 million supply. Its latest purchase added 3,273 BTC for an average price of $77,906 per bitcoin. BTC was trading near $80,100 in Asian morning hours on Monday, up about 20% over the past month.
The break may seem like a non-event, but it comes ahead of Strategy’s first-quarter results on Tuesday, with some Wall Street analysts expecting a loss of $18.98 per share.
Strategy is expected to report first-quarter revenue of about $125 million, according to Yahoo Finance data from six analysts, up about 12.6% from $111.1 million a year earlier. That would mark an improvement over the same quarter last year, when sales fell 3.6%, and suggests the underlying software business is still grinding higher, even if the company’s identity is now tied almost entirely to bitcoin.
However, earnings are expected to be lower. Yahoo Finance’s shows an average estimate of a loss of $27.33 per share for the March quarter, while Zacks Research data points to an expected loss of $3.41 per share for the upcoming release.
Strategy is no longer valued as a software company with a bitcoin position, but as a bitcoin financing vehicle that happens to provide business intelligence software. That means Tuesday’s report may be judged more on the durability of Saylor’s capital-raising machine and less on true operating performance.
One product that is attracting attention is STRC, a perpetual preferred stock designed to trade near $100 while paying a variable monthly dividend, currently around 11.5% annualized.
The returns are supported by Strategy’s balance sheet and bitcoin-heavy capital strategy, but a going concern is that the product could start to look less like stable income and more like credit risk if market sentiment turns.
Higher bitcoin prices support Strategy’s valuation, which improves its ability to raise capital, which funds more bitcoin purchases. But when the mood weakens, the same structure becomes more fragile.
Saylor says buying will resume next week, but Tuesday’s earnings will show how much faith investors still have in the machinery that makes it possible.
