Market News

By Monique Mulima

(Bloomberg) -- MicroStrategy Inc. bought a record $5.4 billion in Bitcoin, the third major purchase announced this month by the crypto hedge fund proxy. 

Using the proceeds from a $3 billion convertible note issue and common share sales, the Tysons Corner, Virginia-based firm acquired 55,500 tokens from Nov. 18 through Nov. 24, according to an US Securities and Exchange Commission filing. MicroStrategy now owns around $38 billion in Bitcoin, making it the largest publicly traded corporate holder of the digital asset. 

MicroStrategy co-founder and Chairman Michael Saylor has captured the attention of Wall Street by turning the enterprise software maker into what he calls a “Bitcoin Treasury” company. The firm’s shares have surged more than 500% this year, outperforming almost every other major stock. If treated like cash, the $38 billion is more than the cash and marketable securities held by all but about a dozen companies in the S&P 500 Index. 

After initially funding the purchases with corporate cash when he started buying Bitcoin in 2020, Saylor has devised a program where the firm sells convertible debt and additional shares. Lenders accepted a zero percent interest rate on the latest convertible issue on a bet that the shares will be more valuable in the future than the conversion price. It announced plans last month to raise $42 billion in capital.

Saylor “has aptly touched upon this financial arbitrage in the capital structure of a corporate treasury,” said Jeffrey Park, portfolio manager and head of alpha strategies at Bitwise Asset Management. “And essentially what he’s created is the ability to borrow, essentially for free.” 

MicroStrategy has acquired 386,700 tokens since 2020 for an average purchase price of around 60% of the current value of its holdings. However, MicroStrategy’s purchases announced on Monday happened last week while Bitcoin was near all-time highs. This led to the company purchasing these new tokens for approximately $97,862 per token, roughly below their current value.

The leverage strategy has caught the attention of skeptics of the plan last week, with shares of MicroStrategy tumbling 16% on Thursday. If Bitcoin significantly drops, MicroStrategy’s stock risks facing the same fate, which happened in 2022 when the digital asset’s price slumped.

“When you apply leverage to anything, you amplify the returns both in the up direction and in the down direction,” TD Cowen analyst Lance Vitanza said. “The only thing that’s novel here is that MicroStrategy is the first company to apply it to Bitcoin.”   

--With assistance from Muyao Shen and Tom Contiliano.

(Adds purchase details in the second paragraph.)