STRATEGY BOUGHT 950 BITCOIN WITH CASH — THEN SPENT MORE THAN TWICE THAT BUYING BACK ITS OWN PREFERRED

Strategy’s 8-K filed September 21 ends the pause. The company bought 950 bitcoin between September 14 and 20 for $75.7 million, about $79,670 each, and now holds 846,000. It sold no stock to do it. The filing: “The bitcoin purchases were made using USD Cash.”

The same cash paid for something bigger. Strategy bought back 1,771,238 shares of its STRC preferred for $174.0 million. Put the two together and nearly 70 cents of every dollar that left USD Cash went to the preferred, not the coin. USD Cash fell from $1.30 billion to $1.05 billion, and those two uses account for all of it. A separate $57.4 million came out of the USD Reserve for preferred dividends and interest.

At $12 a share a year, the retired STRC takes about $21.3 million a year of dividends off the books. That is a real saving, bought at $8.19 of cash for every dollar of yearly obligation erased. It is also $174 million that did not become roughly 2,184 more bitcoin at the week’s average price.

Owning the stock is not owning the coin. The week of September 14, the coin got the smaller check. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $85,216.