STRATEGY HAS BOUGHT NO BITCOIN SINCE AUGUST 30 — IT SPENT $315.6 MILLION BUYING BACK ITS OWN PREFERRED INSTEAD

Saylor posted the holdings chart again on September 20 and called it a little more orange. The chart is cumulative, so it only ever goes up. The number on it, 845,050, is the same number that sat in the 8-K filed September 8 and the 8-K filed September 14. Both filings say the same thing about the week they cover: no bitcoin bought, no bitcoin sold, and not one share sold under the at-the-market program. The last coins went on the books August 30.

What the company has been buying is itself. $176.3 million of STRC in the first week, $139.3 million in the second, $315.6 million in fourteen days, paid out of USD Cash, which fell from $1.44 billion to $1.30 billion. The preferred buyback authorization was doubled to $2.0 billion on September 8.

That is a capital-structure trade, not a bitcoin trade. And when they do buy coins, they buy them with freshly issued stock: the August 24 to 30 purchase of 4,603 coins came out of 4,531,421 shares sold for $602.8 million, of which $369.7 million reached bitcoin. Sixty-one cents on the dollar. The rest went to the preferred and its dividend. A chart that only goes up tells you nothing about the week you are standing in. The filing does.