Saylor shoots down any idea of forced BTC sale

Concerns that Strategy (MSTR) will be forced to sell bitcoin BTC$69,130.25 amid falling prices are “an unfounded concern,” chairman Michael Saylor said during a CNBC interview, affirming the company’s commitment to ongoing purchases.

“Our net leverage ratio is half the typical investment grade company,” Saylor said. “We’ve got 50 years worth of dividends and bitcoin, we’ve got two and a half years worth of dividends just in cash on our balance sheet … we’re not going to be selling, we’re going to be buying bitcoin. I expect we’ll be buying bitcoin every quarter forever.”

Last week, the company added 1,142 BTC to its holdings for roughly $90 million, at an average price of $78,815 per coin. The company’s total stack now stands at 714,644 coins, purchased for about $54.35 billion, bringing the average cost per bitcoin to $76,056 — well above the current price of around $69,000.

Saylor’s comments come as bitcoin has seen significant volatility (almost exclusively downward) over the past months, though he emphasized that swings are part of the asset’s design. “The key to keep in mind is that bitcoin is digital capital,” he continued. “It’s going to be two to four times as volatile as traditional capital like gold or equity or real estate. It’s got two to four times the performance this decade of traditional capital. It’s the most useful global capital asset in the world, you can put more leverage on it. You can trade it in more ways than any other kind of capital assets. So the volatility is the bug, but the volatility is the feature.”

Strategy reported an operating loss of $17.4 billion and a net loss of $12.6 billion for the fourth quarter, reflecting largely non-cash mark-to-market accounting tied to bitcoin’s price decline. The results highlight how swings in the cryptocurrency’s value continue to influence the company’s financial statements despite its long-term investment strategy.

Saylor also addressed the notion that bitcoin’s current price levels could represent a new form of market maturity, which he characterized as a good thing.

Strategy’s balance sheet and its digital credit business are central to its strategy, Saylor said. The firm’s digital credit structure has emerged as one of the most actively traded credit instruments of the decade, generating substantially higher cash flow than traditional fixed-income products and far exceeding the trading volume of preferred stocks.

“There isn’t any credit risk in the balance sheet of the company,” he said.

Saylor declined to offer a short-term bitcoin price prediction but reiterated confidence in long-term performance. “I don’t really make predictions over 12 months. I think that bitcoin is going to double or triple the performance of the S&P over the next four to eight years. And I think that’s the only thing we need to know.”

Shares of the company are down 3% on Tuesday, bringing the year-to-date decline to 15% and the year-over-year fall to 60%.