MicroStrategy Market Value Tops $100 Billion as Bitcoin Hits New High
MicroStrategy MSTR+11.89% is riding the bitcoin surge to a $100 billion market value.
Shares of the largest corporate bitcoin holder are up 11.2% Tuesday to $427.96, continuing its rally with the stock nearly doubling since the Nov. 5 election. The stock has been a huge winner this year as the shares are up about sevenfold.
Bitcoin is at a new high, gaining 2.8% to around $94,000 as it nears the $100,000 threshold. The cryptocurrency is up about 35% since the election as investors see Donald Trump as crypto-friendly.
MicroStrategy’s market value based on its basic shares outstanding is $96 billion. But its market capitalization is $110 billion using a fully diluted share count of 256.3 million shares that the company disclosed Monday in an 8-K that includes shares that would be issued to satisfy outstanding convertible debt. MicroStrategy is now one of largest U.S. companies not in the S&P 500 index.
Investors are gravitating toward MicroStrategy because they like the company’s strategy of aggressively adding to its bitcoin holdings and the financial leverage that the company employs.
The company said late Monday that it plans to sell $1.75 billion of new convertible bonds at a rate of 0%. MicroStrategy will have about $6 billion of debt following the debt deal.
The company has sold about $6.6 billion of stock since Oct. 31. The latest equity sales totaling $4.6 billion came from Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 and were used to buy a like amount of bitcoin.
Investors are paying a big premium for the company’s bitcoin holdings of 331,200 coins as of Nov. 17. The stock now trades for a record premium of more than three times the value of that stake of about $31 billion. The company owns more 1.5% of the roughly 20 million bitcoin outstanding.
Part of the bull case is that MicroStrategy’s strategy of issuing equity at elevated levels and debt allows it to accretively buy bitcoin with bitcoin holdings rising at a higher rate than share issuance.
MicroStrategy chairman and controlling shareholder Michael Saylor outlined a “21-21” strategy in October to sell $21 billion of stock and a like amount of bonds over the next three years to buy Bitcoin and the company is well on its way to achieving that goal with the recent equity sales and coming bond sale.
“MicroStrategy’s approach is to embrace the volatility, embrace an asset that is outperforming the S&P. And in that world, instead of being negatively polarized to capital, we are positively
polarized to capital. The more capital that we gather, the more powerful we become, and the more we enrich our own shareholders,” Saylor said on the third-quarter earnings conference call. The company has introduced a concept called bitcoin yield that measures its ability to grow its bitcoin holdings faster than its shares count.
The roughly nine analysts who follow it are uniform in recommending the stock.
“While MSTR’s controversial strategy has attracted many detractors, its dramatic impact on the company’s share price has provided ample justification, as its stock has outperformed those of almost every large company in the U.S. during the past four-plus years,” wrote Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer in a client note Monday.
Peter Schiff, the chief economist at Europac.com, took a different view Tuesday, writing on X: “The higher the price of $MSTR stock, the more shares @Saylor can sell. The more shares he sells, the more #Bitcoin he can buy. The more Bitcoin he buys, the higher the Bitcoin price rises. When the price of Bitcoin goes up, the share price of MSTR goes up more. When does it end?”
He also noted that MicroStrategy’s market value is now larger than the combined market value of the two leading gold miners, Barrick Gold and Newmont.
Investors are now are effectively paying about $300,000, a huge premium to the current bitcoin price, for each bitcoin in the company’s stake. That highlights the risk as the company’s stock traded at roughly parity to its bitcoin stake at year-end 2023. If the premium contracts, the stock will lag behind bitcoin. But giddy investors believe bitcoin is heading toward $100,000 and beyond and that MicroStrategy is the best way to play it.
Write to Andrew Bary at andrew.bary@barrons.com
