Strategy pauses bitcoin (BTC) buys before Tuesday earnings

Strategy is taking a breather from buying bitcoin.

Michael Saylor said Sunday the company would not add to its bitcoin holdings this week, pausing its regular purchase program ahead of Tuesday’s first-quarter earnings release.

“No buys 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 turned itself into the largest publicly traded bitcoin treasury company and one of the most closely watched proxies for institutional BTC exposure. The company last skipped a weekly purchase during the week of March 23 to March 29.

Strategy currently holds 818,334 BTC, equal to nearly 3.9% of bitcoin’s fixed 21 million supply. 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 Monday, up about 20% over the past month.

The pause may seem a non-event but comes ahead of Strategy’s first-quarter results 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 roughly 12.6% from $111.1 million a year earlier. That would mark an improvement from the same quarter last year, when sales fell 3.6%, and suggests the underlying software business is still grinding higher even as the company’s identity is now almost entirely tied to bitcoin.

Earnings are expected to be lower, however. Yahoo Finance’s shows an average estimate for a loss of $27.33 per share for the March quarter, while Zacks Research data points to an expected loss of $3.41 per share for the upcoming release.

Strategy is no longer valued as a software company with a bitcoin position, but as a bitcoin financing vehicle that happens to provide business intelligence software. That means Tuesday’s report may be judged more on the durability of Saylor’s capital-raising machine and less for true operating performance.

One product drawing attention is STRC, a perpetual preferred share designed to trade near $100 while paying a variable monthly dividend, currently around 11.5% annualized.

The pitch is yield backed by Strategy’s balance sheet and bitcoin-heavy capital strategy, but a going concern is that the product can start to look less like stable income and more like credit risk if market sentiment turns.

Higher bitcoin prices support Strategy’s valuation which improves its ability to raise capital, which funds more bitcoin purchases. However, when sentiment weakens, the same structure gets more fragile.

Saylor says the buying resumes next week, but Tuesday’s earnings will show how much confidence investors still have in the machinery that makes that possible.