MW Strategy's sinking stock puts the policy of 'don't ever sell your bitcoin' to the test

By Tomi Kilgore

The value of Strategy's bitcoin holdings is now below the company's market cap, which the company's CEO has said could lead to bitcoin sales

Bitcoin's selloff means Strategy is now losing money on its holdings, which it has been accumulating for nearly six years.

Shares of Strategy sank to near a two-year low on Thursday, as the sharp selloff in bitcoin, which the company has been accumulating for nearly six years, has put the value of its cryptocurrency holdings in the red.

The combination of the declines in both the stock (MSTR) and bitcoin (BTCUSD) has also put a key value metric - multiple to net asset value, or mNAV - below 1, which CEO Phong Le said late last year he hoped wouldn't happen, because it could possibly force the company to sell some of its holdings.

Strategy is the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, and the development comes just hours before the company - formerly known as MicroStrategy and still technically a software company - is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter earnings report. If past post-earnings calls with analysts are any guide, the bulk of the executives' conversation will be about bitcoin.

Strategy's stock tumbled 12.1% in recent morning trading, on track for the lowest close since May 2, 2024. That put the company's market capitalization at $32.61 billion.

Meanwhile, bitcoin sank 7.4% to just below $67,900, according to FactSet data, a price the cryptocurrency hasn't seen since November 2024.

The company has been buying bitcoin since August 2020, when it adopted bitcoin as its primary treasury-reserve asset. Earlier this week, the company disclosed that it owned 713,500 bitcoin, which it acquired at an average price of $76,052 each.

That means the current market value of the company's holdings is about $5.8 billion less than what the company paid for its holdings.

But perhaps more important, the mNAV, which is calculated by dividing the company's market cap by the market value of its bitcoin holdings, would be 0.67.

In a podcast in late November, Le said that if mNAV fell below 1 "and we didn't have other access to capital, we would sell bitcoin."

That's in contrast to what Michael Saylor, Strategy's executive chair, said in the company's third-quarter earnings call in late October, when he noted the Trump administration's push to make the United States a bitcoin superpower, "with president's point that you don't ever sell your bitcoin."

Meanwhile, the company has shown that it still has access to capital, as it has been raising money through the sale of both preferred and common stock so that it can buy more bitcoin.

But the company's plans for its bitcoin holdings could be a key focus for investors and analysts on the earnings call, given that mNAV did break 1. On the third-quarter call, the word "bitcoin" was uttered about 170 times, according to an AlphaSense transcript, while the word "software" was spoken just four times.

But in case there are investors who actually care about the software results, analysts are modeling for fourth-quarter revenue of $119.1 million, according to FactSet, and for a per-share loss of 8 cents.

Keep in mind that the bottom-line results can be heavily influenced by the price of bitcoin, as third-quarter operating income included a $3.9 billion unrealized gain on the company's digital assets.

-Tomi Kilgore

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February 05, 2026 12:05 ET (17:05 GMT)

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