Michael Saylor backs STRC after strategy sells bitcoin to fund preferred dividends

Disclosure: The author of this story owns shares in Strategy (MSTR).

Strategy (MSTR) Executive Chairman Michael Saylor appeared to underscore the company’s focus on its perpetual preferred stock, making STRC the focus of his first public comment after the largest publicly traded holder of bitcoin BTC$72,675.37 sold the cryptocurrency to fund dividend payments on the instrument.

“Our goal is to make STRC the best credit instrument in the world,” Saylor wrote on X on Monday.

The post came after the company said it sold 32 bitcoin for about $2.5 million last week. Proceeds from the sale “are expected to be used to fund distributions on preferred stock,” it said in an 8-K filing.

While the filing directly linked the sale to the dividend payment, Saylor’s decision to highlight the equity rather than the bitcoin sale is likely to reinforce investor perceptions that the company is increasingly focused on building its preferred stock while growing bitcoin exposure on a per-share basis.

Saylor has repeatedly argued that Strategy evaluates financing and capital allocation decisions through the lens of bitcoin per share and increasing shareholder value rather than simply maximizing the amount of bitcoin it owns.

Buy high, sell low

A running joke among crypto followers on X, the so-called Crypto Twitter, is that Strategy always buys bitcoin at the weekly high.

Yet the company’s only previous bitcoin sale took place in December 2022, when the largest cryptocurrency was priced at roughly $18,000, just weeks after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX pushed prices to a cycle low near $15,000.

This time, it sold at an average price of $77,135, with bitcoin now trading around $70,000 after falling as low as $60,000 in February. The question is whether it has again sold near a market bottom.