The strategy is to take a break when buying bitcoins.
Michael Saylor said on Sunday that the company would not increase its bitcoin holdings this week, pausing its regular purchasing program ahead of Tuesday’s first-quarter earnings release.
“No shopping this week. Back to work next week,” Saylor wrote on X.
The pause is only the second this year for Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, which has become the largest publicly traded bitcoin treasury company and one of the most followed representatives of institutional exposure to BTC. The last time the company skipped a weekly purchase was during the week of March 23-29.
The strategy currently holds 818,334 BTC, which is equivalent to almost 3.9% of the fixed supply of 21 million bitcoins. Its most recent purchase added 3,273 BTC at an average price of $77,906 per bitcoin. BTC was trading near $80,100 in Asian morning hours on Monday, up about 20% from last month.
The pause may seem insignificant, but it comes ahead of Strategy’s first-quarter results on Tuesday, with some Wall Street analysts expecting a loss of $18.98 per share.
Strategy is expected to report first-quarter revenue of about $125 million, according to Yahoo Finance data from six analysts, up about 12.6% from $111.1 million a year earlier. This would mark an improvement over the same quarter last year, when sales fell 3.6%, and suggests that the underlying software business is still rising even as the company’s identity is now almost completely tied to bitcoin.
However, earnings are expected to be lower. Yahoo Finance shows an average estimate of a loss of $27.33 per share for the March quarter, while data from Zacks Research points to an expected loss of $3.41 per share for the upcoming release.
The strategy is no longer valued as a software company with a position in bitcoins, but rather as a bitcoin financing vehicle that provides business intelligence software. That means Tuesday’s report can be judged more on the durability of Saylor’s capital-raising machine and less on true operating performance.
One product attracting attention is STRC, a perpetual preferred stock designed to trade near $100 while paying a variable monthly dividend, currently around 11.5% annualized.
The talk is a performance backed by Strategy’s balance sheet and bitcoin-heavy equity strategy, but a current concern is that the product may start to look less like a stable income and more like a credit risk if market sentiment changes.
Higher bitcoin prices support Strategy’s valuation, improving its ability to raise capital, which funds more bitcoin purchases. However, when the feeling weakens, the same structure becomes more fragile.
Saylor says buying will resume next week, but Tuesday’s gains will show how much confidence investors still have in the machinery that makes it possible.
