STRATEGY BOUGHT NO BITCOIN — IT SPENT $204.9 MILLION BUYING BACK ITS OWN PREFERRED — USD CASH FELL FROM $640.5 MILLION TO $242.4 MILLION IN TWO WEEKS

Strategy's 8-K, filed at 8:49 AM ET on October 26, 2026, covers October 19 to 25. It sold no shares through its at-the-market program and did not buy or sell any bitcoin. It still holds about 848,517, bought for $64.02 billion, about $75,446 each. What it did buy was its own paper: 2,068,459 shares of STRC, its 12% variable-rate preferred, for $204.9 million, about $99.06 a share. All of it came out of what Strategy calls USD Cash.

That pile is shrinking fast. USD Cash was $640.5 million on October 11, $447.3 million on October 18 and $242.4 million on October 25. That is $398.1 million gone in two weeks, 62.2%, almost all of it STRC buybacks: $193.1 million, then $204.9 million. Since September 14, Strategy's weekly filings show $1.07 billion of STRC bought back and none sold. It has $956.8 million of preferred buyback room left, $714.4 million more than the USD Cash. The bigger $4.83 billion USD Reserve is set aside for dividends and interest.

Why buy back STRC instead of bitcoin? STRC is meant to trade near $100, and Strategy said on October 15 it would keep the 12% rate until it does. At $99.06, it still doesn't. For common holders the trade is close to even. CEBE Tracker (cebetracker.io) puts senior claims at 22.15% at $80,049 bitcoin, the same as the October 18 balances give at that price.

Here is the first principle. A promise to pay dollars needs dollars. Strategy raised money by selling claims that get paid before the common stock, and now it is spending its dollars to hold up the price of those claims rather than to buy the coin it was built to buy. At this pace, USD Cash covers about one more week. After that, the money comes from new shares, from the reserve, or from the bitcoin. Strategy has sold bitcoin for dividends before, in late May and early July. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $80,318.