Strategy sold 1,638 bitcoin and bought back its own preferred stock below par

Strategy (MSTR) sold 1,638 bitcoin last week for $104.73 million and raised a further $290.6 million by issuing 3.01 million common shares, according to an SEC filing disclosed Monday morning and reported by CoinDesk. The proceeds went to preferred dividends, a $250 million addition to the company's dollar reserve, and the repurchase of 912,143 shares of its STRC preferred stock for $81.2 million.

The sales leave Strategy holding 842,138 BTC, acquired for $63.51 billion at an average price of $75,419, CoinDesk reported from the filing. Decrypt, reporting the same disclosure separately, put the sale at $105 million and confirmed the dollar reserve reaching $4 billion. The two accounts agree on the substance; CoinDesk's $104.73 million is the precise figure, $105 million the rounded one.

The mechanics

Three transactions ran in parallel last week, and the direction of each matters more than its size.

The bitcoin sale. Arithmetic on the disclosed figures puts the average realised price at roughly $63,938 per coin — above where bitcoin traded on Monday, which suggests the selling happened earlier in the week rather than into the weekend decline. That price is about 15% below the $75,419 average cost of the remaining stack. Neither report specifies the tax lots sold, so whether the sale was booked at a gain or a loss against specific acquisition prices isn't disclosed.

The equity raise. Strategy issued 3.01 million common shares for $290.6 million, an implied average of about $96.54 a share. Combined with the coin sales, that is roughly $395.3 million of cash raised in a single week.

The preferred buyback. Strategy repurchased 912,143 STRC shares for $81.2 million — an average of about $89.02 per share against a stated value of $100. STRC carries a 12% annual dividend on that $100 stated value, so retiring those shares removes roughly $10.95 million of annual dividend obligation for an $81.2 million outlay, an effective return of about 13.5% on the cash deployed. Buying back a 12%-coupon instrument at 89 cents on the dollar is, on its own terms, a rational trade.

Uses roughly reconcile with sources: $250 million to the reserve plus $81.2 million of buybacks accounts for $331.2 million of the $395.3 million raised, leaving about $64 million — the filing's disclosed allocation to preferred dividends isn't broken out further in either report, and cash is fungible, so the mapping shouldn't be read as one-to-one.

Separately, Strategy said over the weekend that it will hold STRC's annual dividend rate at 12% and "does not intend to recommend a reduction until the shares trade consistently near their stated $100 value," per CoinDesk's account.

Market backdrop

MSTR was down 1.9% pre-market as CoinDesk published, with bitcoin at $62,500 after a weekend decline; Decrypt's price page showed BTC at $62,663 around the same time. CoinDesk's own live coverage cited $62,400. The spread is intraday noise, but it places bitcoin in the low-$62,000s to high-$62,000s on Monday — roughly $13,000 below Strategy's average cost basis. At $62,663, the 842,138 coins are worth about $52.8 billion against $63.51 billion paid: an unrealised shortfall of roughly $10.7 billion on the disclosed numbers.

CoinDesk's Monday headline list attributes the weakness partly to an ongoing exploit affecting Coldcard hardware wallets, now in its fifth day, with estimated losses "may near $114 million" and a possible fourth sweep emerging. Those figures are headline-level estimates from CoinDesk's coverage of a still-developing incident, not confirmed totals, and are context here rather than part of the Strategy story.

Key facts

• 1,638 BTC sold for $104.73 million; Decrypt reported the same sale as $105 million (CoinDesk, Decrypt, both citing the SEC filing)
• Holdings now 842,138 BTC, acquired for $63.51 billion at an average $75,419 per coin (SEC filing via CoinDesk)
• 3.01 million MSTR common shares issued for $290.6 million (SEC filing via CoinDesk)
• 912,143 STRC preferred shares repurchased for $81.2 million — about $89.02 per share against $100 stated value (SEC filing via CoinDesk)
• USD reserve increased by $250 million to $4 billion total (CoinDesk; corroborated by Decrypt)
• STRC annual dividend held at 12%, with no reduction intended until shares trade near $100 (company statement over the weekend, via CoinDesk)
• MSTR down 1.9% pre-market; BTC quoted between $62,400 and $62,663 (CoinDesk, Decrypt)

The real-world read

The flywheel is running backwards. The model that built this company was: issue securities, buy bitcoin, repeat. Last week it issued securities and sold bitcoin — and neither the equity nor the coin proceeds bought a single satoshi. They funded dividends, a dollar pile, and a buyback of the company's own paper. CoinDesk's headline word is "another," and its subhead says "trimmed," both signalling this is not a one-off. A treasury company selling the asset it exists to hold, in order to service the instruments it sold to buy that asset, is a materially different business from the one pitched to shareholders.

The dividend statement is an admission. Saying the 12% rate stays until STRC "trades consistently near their stated $100 value" concedes that it does not currently. The company's own buyback price confirms it: $89.02 average. Decrypt's price page carried a listing labelled STRCX at $93.12 — whether that is the same instrument isn't stated, but every available mark sits below par. The framing — a commitment not to cut — is doing work that the underlying fact, a preferred trading at a discount, does not support.

The buyback is arbitrage, but it's also a signal. Retiring a 12% coupon at 89 cents is good math. It also means the cheapest asset Strategy could find last week was its own liability — not bitcoin at $62,500. That's the company voting with $81.2 million.

What isn't said. Neither report gives a reason for the sale, the dates or venues of the individual disposals, the exact split of proceeds to preferred dividends, or the total annual dividend burden across all preferred series that the $4 billion reserve is meant to cover. Nor is there any statement on whether further sales are planned. The filing, as reported, discloses the transactions and not the strategy behind them.

Opinion, and whose

The only forward-looking statement on the table is Strategy's own, and it comes from the most interested party available: the company says it does not intend to recommend cutting STRC's 12% dividend until the shares trade consistently near $100. That is an intention, not a commitment, and it is conditional on a price recovery the company does not control. Neither CoinDesk nor Decrypt carried outside analyst commentary on the sale, so no independent forecast is attached to it here.

Sources

• CoinDesk (2026-08-03) — the substantive account: BTC sale volume and proceeds, remaining holdings and cost basis, share issuance, STRC repurchase count and price, USD reserve, the dividend statement, and MSTR/BTC price moves. CoinDesk cites an SEC filing published Monday morning as its source. Its page also carried a promotional item, "The Evolution of the Crypto CEX Landscape: A Case Study on Binance" — branded content about Binance, not journalism, and unrelated to this story.
• Decrypt (2026-08-03) — independent confirmation of the $105 million sale and the $4 billion dollar reserve, plus live price quotes (BTC $62,663, a listing labelled STRCX at $93.12). Decrypt also cites the filing.
• SEC filing, Strategy Inc. — the primary document behind both reports. Figures above are as characterised by CoinDesk and Decrypt.
• Derived figures — average sale price, average buyback price, dividend savings, and the unrealised gap — are arithmetic on the disclosed numbers, marked as such in the text.

Not financial advice. Reporting only.