Strategy's bitcoin stack is 3.8% above cost, and that gap is the whole green headline

Strategy paid an average of $75,385 a coin across 840,447 bitcoin ^[1]. At $78,400 that leaves $3,015 of cushion per coin, or 3.8% of the current price ^[1]. The same coin count means the treasury's reported result moves in $840 million increments: every $1,000 on the tape is $840 million of unrealized gain or loss ^[2]. Nothing in the operating business produces numbers of that size, so the headline is set by a print the company does not control.

What management did while the position was underwater is the more useful record. Since May it sold 6,948 bitcoin for about $432.5 million and put the proceeds into buying back STRC, its variable-rate preferred ^[6], including 1,690 coins for $109 million in the week ending August 9 ^[7]. That averages roughly $62,250 a coin, about $13,100 below the stated cost basis, or close to $91 million of realized loss ^[3]. Michael Saylor had spent years saying Strategy would never sell bitcoin ^[10]. Through the months when the price sat in the low-to-mid $60,000s, below cost, the company was a net seller of coins and a net seller of its own shares ^[9].

The recovery, then, was not bought at home. Tyler Warner, writing in Decrypt's Morning Minute, attributes the turn to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent starting yield curve control and the resulting capital flood into the spot bitcoin ETFs, and argues bitcoin plainly does not need Saylor's bid ^[13]. It came in the week bitcoin closed its largest weekly candle on record, up 23% at $78.9k ^[14].

That leaves the cash question. The $6.7 billion dollar reserve ^[8] is about 85,500 coins at Friday's price, roughly a tenth more stack than the company already holds ^[4]. It is also the same money funding preferred dividends and defending STRC, which was quoted at $95.60 against the $100 handle ^[11]. Those are rival uses, and only one of them adds coins.

The equity has already picked a side. MSTR's one-month move is close to seven times the entire cushion the coins carry ^[5], which is what a levered claim on a single price level looks like when the price cooperates. For anyone marking the position, the operating decisions matter less than whether $75,385 holds.