The strategy takes a break by buying Bitcoin.
Michael Saylor said Sunday that the company would not increase its bitcoin holdings this week, suspending its regular buying program ahead of Tuesday’s first-quarter earnings release.
“No purchases this week. Back to work next week,” Saylor wrote on X.
The pause is only the second this year for Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, which has become the largest publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company and one of the most closely watched proxies for institutional exposure to BTC. The company last skipped a weekly purchase during the week of March 23-29.
Strategy currently holds 818,334 BTC, which equates to almost 3.9% of the fixed supply of 21 million Bitcoin. Its most recent purchase added 3,273 BTC at an average price of $77,906 per bitcoin. BTC was trading near $80,100 as of Monday morning in Asia, up about 20% over the past month.
The pause may seem like a non-event, but it comes ahead of Strategy’s first-quarter earnings release 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. This would mark an improvement from the same quarter last year, when sales fell 3.6%, and suggests that the underlying software business continues to grow, even though the company’s identity is now almost entirely tied to bitcoin.
However, revenues are expected to be lower. Yahoo Finance carries an average estimate of a loss of $27.33 per share for the March quarter, while data from Zacks Research indicates an expected loss of $3.41 per share for the next release.
The strategy is no longer seen as a software company with a Bitcoin position, but as a Bitcoin financing vehicle that provides business intelligence software. That means Tuesday’s report can be judged more on the sustainability of Saylor’s capital-raising machine and less on its true operational performance.
One product attracting attention is STRC, a perpetual preferred stock designed to trade near $100 while paying a variable monthly dividend, currently about 11.5% annualized.
The pitch is return backed by the strategy’s balance sheet and a bitcoin-heavy capital strategy, but an ongoing concern is that the product may start to look less like a stable income and more like a credit risk if market sentiment changes.
Rising Bitcoin prices support Strategy’s valuation, which improves its ability to raise capital, which funds more Bitcoin purchases. However, when feeling weakens, the same structure becomes more fragile.
Saylor says buying will resume next week, but Tuesday’s results will show how much confidence investors still have in the mechanism that makes that possible.
