Strategy raises $5.4B but barely buys bitcoin

Michael Saylor’s Strategy diluted common shareholders by $5.4 billion worth of stock sales between July and September but bought just $588 million worth of BTC. This means that less than 11 cents from every $1 raised last quarter went towards buying BTC.

Strategy says that when it wants to buy BTC, it goes to the “ATM,” its own term for at-the-market share sales that dilute shareholders. Because the company throws off minimal cash flow from operations, the corporation almost always sells stock to fund its purchases.

The company has spent most of the past five years amassing more BTC on leverage, but last quarter, it backtracked. Indeed, the company sold 5,552 of its own BTC for $348.6 million, partly to fund dividends and partly to buy-back its STRC.

Those STRC repurchases were particularly expensive because MSTR shareholders overwhelmingly had to shoulder the burden of financing its repurchase.

Even though management pitched STRC as trading near a stable, $100 per share price, it actually dipped into the $70s and $80s for months.

As the above chart above illustrates, in Q3,Strategy spent the vast majority of its fundraises not on BTC but on STRC repurchases and preferred dividends to STRC shareholders, including stockpiling cash for those two latter purposes.

This chart includes all fundraises from every share class Strategy sells: MSTR common stock plus its preferred stocks STRC, STRK, STRF, STRD, and STRE.

For the majority of the five years, the bars are nearly solid orange. Then in 2026, other uses, especially STRC repurchases and dividends to preferred shareholders, dramatically displaced BTC.

Read more: Strategy spent record cash on STRC buybacks at its worst price yet

The self-described BTC treasury company bought 7,218 BTC all quarter and, after accounting for its sales, finished with just 1,666 more coins than it started with.

Strategy’s shrinking allocation of fundraises toward BTC is becoming a trend. Indeed, in 2024, essentially every ATM dollar became BTC.

Even during an anomalous third quarter of 2025 that briefly interrupted its near-100% record, over 94 cents of each $1 ATM still bought BTC.

Then the downward trend commenced with obvious certainty. Q4 2025 dipped below 78% BTC, Q1 2026 recovered to 98%, Q2 2026 fell below 77%, and last quarter fell below 11%. 

Across the first nine months of 2026, a shrinking share of Strategy’s stock sales have funded BTC purchases.

The recent reporting week of October 26 delivered more data along the same trendline: $164 million of fresh MSTR dilution, with a mere 40 cents of each $1 buying BTC.

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