UPDATED: MSCI ADOPTS ITS NON-OPERATING COMPANY RULE — ITS OWN LIST MARKS STRATEGY “DELETED” — $40.3 BILLION OF FLOAT, 93.6% OF THE CUT LIST — TWO DAYS EARLIER SAYLOR SAID MSCI WAS “ACTING LIKE AN UNREGISTERED FINANCIAL ADVISOR” — FINAL WORD NOVEMBER 11

At 4:48 PM ET on October 15, MSCI said it will treat “non-operating companies” as ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes. Every company gets a screen for substantial operating assets, then five financial ratios. Get flagged on four or more and you’re out. A current member only goes if it fails in each of its two most recent annual filing periods, though MSCI says it may also use the latest interim filing. It all runs with the November 2026 review, effective at the close on November 30.

MSCI also posted its own list of who’s caught, built on financials as of September 30. Five securities are marked “Deleted.” Strategy is one, with $40.3 billion of float-adjusted market cap. That’s 93.6% of the $43.0 billion on the whole cut list. Metaplanet and Upexi are on it too. SharpLink, Capital B and 15 others sit on a watchlist. The final list comes November 11.

Now the part that costs money. Strategy told MSCI in August that funds tracking these indexes hold about 13 million of its shares, 3.1% of its basic shares, and less than one day’s trading. Those funds don’t decide anything. If the name comes off the list, they sell. MSCI is also ending its interim rules for companies with 50% or more of their assets in digital assets, including the freeze on share-count increases. From here on, one test covers everybody.

UPDATE: Saylor gave his answer two days before the rule came out. On Bloomberg Talks on October 13 he called the index money “a fairly de minimis amount of capital that they control” and said MSCI was “acting like an unregistered financial advisor” for treating oil, gas and land as capital but not bitcoin. His case is that Strategy is a finance company and digital credit is its product, the way an annuity is an insurer’s. “MSCI is out on their own on this one,” he said. Two days later, MSCI’s list marked Strategy “Deleted” anyway.

At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $81,897.