Strategy is still buying Bitcoin after a symbolic sale rattled investors, but the harder story is not whether Michael Saylor has lost conviction. It is whether the balance sheet can keep carrying that conviction while Bitcoin trades below the company's average cost.
Strategy gave the market the signal it wanted on June 8: it bought more Bitcoin. The company disclosed in a regulatory filing that it acquired 1,550 BTC for about $101.3 million between June 1 and June 7, at an average price of $65,332 per coin. That lifted its holdings to 845,256 BTC, keeping Strategy far ahead of other public companies that have copied Michael Saylor's treasury playbook.
The purchase came one week after a much smaller transaction drew a much louder reaction. Strategy sold 32 BTC for roughly $2.5 million at an average price of $77,135, according to Investor's Business Daily, using the proceeds as part of a dividend payment due at the end of May. The sale was tiny beside the company's full treasury, but it mattered because Saylor has spent years turning "never sell" into part of Strategy's identity.
Phong Le, Strategy's chief executive, has tried to frame the sale as a financing decision rather than a retreat from Bitcoin. That is a fair distinction. The June 8 purchase made the arithmetic hard to miss: Strategy sold $2.5 million worth of Bitcoin and then bought more than $100 million a week later. The company also increased its cash reserve for preferred stock dividend obligations by $100 million to $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
There is still a price problem sitting underneath the fresh buy. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bitcoin was trading around $63,350 on June 8, below Strategy's latest purchase price and well below the company's average cost basis, which recent reports have put near $75,700 to $76,000 per coin. On 845,256 BTC, that gap leaves Strategy with a paper loss measured in billions of dollars. The Financial Times recently estimated the unrealized loss at roughly $11 billion.
Strategy's earnings already show what that volatility does when it flows through fair-value accounting. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that the company recorded a $14.5 billion unrealized loss in the first quarter after Bitcoin fell 23%, its worst first-quarter performance since 2018. Earlier, Strategy had posted a $12.4 billion net loss for the fourth quarter of 2025 after a separate Bitcoin slide. These are accounting losses until assets are sold, but they are not imaginary to investors watching the stock and the financing stack.
Saylor's answer is to measure the company through Bitcoin per share rather than through a plain reading of quarterly earnings. Strategy has emphasized Bitcoin per share, often shortened to BPS, as a way to judge whether its financing activity increases the amount of Bitcoin backing each common share. In theory, that metric helps investors separate useful accumulation from dilution.
The problem is that BPS can flatter the strategy when the liabilities are doing more work than the common share count suggests. Investor's Business Daily recently argued that Strategy's Bitcoin-per-share metric leaves out important costs, including the future dilution that may come from paying preferred dividends with stock. STRC, the company's Stretch preferred stock, carries a high dividend rate, and issuing more securities to buy more Bitcoin only works cleanly when markets are willing to keep funding the structure.
This is the part of Strategy's story that gets lost when the debate is reduced to Saylor's personal conviction. The company is not simply holding Bitcoin like a corporate version of cold storage. It has built a capital markets machine around Bitcoin, using common stock, preferred stock, convertibles, cash reserves, and carefully chosen metrics to keep the accumulation engine moving. When Bitcoin rises, that structure can amplify the upside. When Bitcoin falls below the company's cost basis, the same structure makes every financing choice more visible.
That visibility matters because Strategy is no longer alone. Semler Scientific in the United States and Metaplanet in Japan have both followed the broad Saylor model, while a longer list of smaller public companies has tried to turn Bitcoin treasury policy into an equity story. Strategy remains the standard-setter, but standard-setters also get judged first when the model starts to strain.
So the latest purchase should calm one narrow fear: Strategy is not behaving like a forced seller. It sold 32 BTC for a dividend obligation, then bought 1,550 BTC the following week. That is not capitulation.
It does not settle the larger question. Buying more Bitcoin at $65,332 while the company carries an average cost closer to $76,000 is conviction, but it is also a wager that capital markets will stay open long enough for the cycle to turn. Saylor can keep adding coins. Investors still have to decide whether they want Bitcoin exposure, or Bitcoin exposure wrapped inside Strategy's liabilities.
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