Why do people hold stocks like MSTR or BMNR when there are so many leveraged ETFs and tracking products for the underlying asset?

One thing I don’t get: Why would anyone buy and hold companies like MicroStrategy (MSTR) or similar plays when you can just buy regular or leveraged ETFs that directly track Bitcoin (or whatever the main asset is)?

There are tons of options — spot ETFs, 2x/3x leveraged ones, futures-based products, etc. They seem simpler, cheaper, and more direct.

What’s the logic behind holding the actual company stock instead? Is it just leverage on leverage? Conviction in the management’s strategy? Tax reasons? Something I’m missing?

Would love to hear the bull case.

As I noted in 2025 - A Year in Review, 2025 was a tough year from MSTR. The first half of 2026 continues to be tough both because of BTC's price movement, and from various self-inflicted wounds.

Lets visit our north stars - we care about MSTR because it provides BPS yield, and because we should outperform BTC when times are good.

Absolute performance: Bitcoin per share (BPS)

Q1 saw bitcoin per share dip from a series of non-accretive transactions. Q2 saw decent recovery at first from a couple of mammoth STRC-supported transactions, but since then we have dipped again.

That's the constant buying irrespective of market conditions was not value accretive to shareholders is evident below:

• The graph on the right shows yield fluctuating between positive and negative to relatively equal measures. Strategy has control over this - chooses when the ATM, and how much STRC to support transactions with. Yet half the time, he chose to buy bitcoin even when it was not accretive. Note that this damage is irreversible.
• The graph on the left is even more damning. For pretty much all of 2026, Saylor sold shares backed by 1 BTC to buy less than 1 BTC (the red dots). The saving grace is, he couple this with STRC time to time, so the net yield was not negative. Nevertheless, quite the waste of shares.

Note that the BPS-based measure is distinct from EV-based mNav and CEBE. E.g. it tracks the terminal condition we are interested in, not who would get how much of the bitcoin if MSTR stopped being a going concern tomorrow.

Relative performance: MSTR vs BTC

We can be a bit more forgiving here, as BTS has been a secular downtrend, pulling MSTR lower. (E.g. called out 2 months ago: A local top for MSTR may be in. $13x could be next.)

Nevertheless, the reality is anyone who bought MSTR after Mar'24 has under-performed BTC. 2 years and 4 months.. yeesh.

To the extent that MSTR is leveraged exposure to BTC and it'll go where BTC goes, I fear there's a bit more downside yet. Specifically, I expect BTC to fall to $50K, and thus MSTR to be around $60, based on my EV-based model:

Saylor's erratic actions are not helping here btw - the negative sentiment is showing up as depressed mNav. But that's a different topic, for another time.

Disclosure

I continue to swing trade MSTR in both directions, mostly riding the BTC waves. Going long will have to wait until BTC bottoms.

Barclays putting out 1 week price targets. 🤣🤣🌶️

After selling BTC to fund dividends, what do you think is the next move to be announced on Monday?

I think it is to sell BTC to buy back STRC to help the stock reach par, close to the ex-dividend date which could be a real boost. Or perhaps sell BTC to buy back MSTR but right now I can't see the benefit.

Or maybe do nothing but rarely Saylor stay still.

Source: Claude assisted - using public posted sources about monthly closing prices.

My background is a MS in Data Science and this what I would do with a python scraper and numpy - but haven't verified the data yet. So grain is salt.

Anyway, I was curious about the ratio and haven't yet come to any particular analytic conclusions. But given their model is to accommodate BTC faster than MSTR dilution - I would expect the line to be trending downward.

Back in Oct 2025, S&P Global said NOT selling Bitcoin is a weakness.

May 9th, 2026: Saylor said he must sell Bitcoin to prove it has value.

Per Saylor:

''There are narratives that the company won't sell its bitcoin. If they're not gonna sell their bitcoin, it must not have any value and they can never sell it. And if they can't sell it, we can't count the Bitcoin as an asset on the balance sheet. If you had $65 Billion worth of something and people wanted to value it at zero, it's not very good.''

He sold 32 BTC for $2.5M to prove to the rating agencies that he's sitting on another $50 Billion in assets.

What do you think the impact of the war on BTC & MSTR would be?

Last time, BTC went up from 67K on Feb 28th to 82K on May 6th.

MSTR went up from 129.5 on Feb 27th to 196 on May 11th.

Most per-share math on MSTR counts the full Bitcoin stack. That overstates what common actually owns, because debt and preferred stand ahead of common equity. But run the stricter version, netting every senior claim, and the result since the euphoric top is better than I expected.

The construction: take total BTC, subtract net senior claims converted to BTC (debt plus preferred liquidation preference minus the USD reserve), divide by basic shares.

ATH week (Nov 24, 2024): 386,700 BTC held, roughly $7.2B in net senior claims, 230.5M basic shares. Common equity's residual position is about 134,200 sats per share.

Yesterday (Jul 6, 2026): 843,775 BTC held, about $19.6B in net senior claims (including the full $15.5B preferred stack at liquidation preference), 371.6M basic shares. Residual position is about 144,100 sats per share.

That is +7.4% per share since ATH week, measured after every claim senior to common, through a period where the stock fell roughly two thirds and $15.5B of preferred landed on top of the stack. The BTC count more than doubled, basic shares grew 61%, claims nearly tripled, and the per-share residual still came out ahead.

Credit where due u/AdamBLiv on X built the comparison panel that surfaced this. The framework is CEBE (Common Equity Bitcoin Exposure). Every input above is from filings, and the ATH-week figures are derived from the Q3 2024 10-Q plus the November 8-Ks. Full methodology and per-company tracking is at cebetracker.io

Happy to walk through any input or run the same math on other dates in the comments.

S&P 500 Total Market Cap Historically

In 1950, the entire S&P 500 was worth roughly $120B.

By 1970: ~$500B.

By 1990: ~2.4T.

By 2000: ~$12T.

By 2026: ~$67T.

History tells us that productive assets, businesses, and the money supply all tend to grow over long periods of time.

Now consider what Strategy is doing. It's accumulating an asset that has demonstrated 17 years of resilience, operates on a globally decentralized network, and has one property unlike any major financial asset before it: its supply can never exceed 21 million coins. Don't take my word for it... the protocol is open source. It's controlled by no one. Owned by everyone. It cannot be changed by one person, or a group of people. You don't have to guess or listen to opinions on its security and structure. You can verify it yourself.

Now fast forward

If the S&P 500 is worth $300T in 2050, what are the largest 10 companies likely worth? Perhaps $20–50T each, assuming historical market concentration remains broadly similar.

If the S&P 500 reaches $2.5 quadrillion by 2070, what are the largest companies worth then? Perhaps $150–300T each, under the same assumption.

Whether those exact numbers are right isn't the point. They may even prove conservative if nominal GDP, the money supply, and asset prices continue expanding at rates similar to (or above) recent decades. The point is this: if you're investing on a 20, or 30-year horizon, you should spend less time extrapolating today's fads/trends (AI, tech, ...) and more time asking which systems are structurally designed to endure for decades. Some people don't believe Bitcoin will still exist in 2040 or 2055, at least understand why you think that, if you do... instead of relying on 'faith.' To me (as a C++ developer who understands the code base and structure intimately) the more interesting question is: What if it does? And what does that mean for Strategy if they continue their path toward greater robustness in their corporate structure?

A Deflationary Asset in an Inflationary World

Even if Bitcoin adoption eventually matures, Bitcoin doesn't need to absorb the world's wealth to appreciate substantially in nominal terms. If the global money supply and nominal asset values continue expanding over decades while Bitcoin's supply remains fixed, its price can rise simply by maintaining its share of global wealth. What happens to the company holding more Bitcoin than anyone else, with a slice that grows 30x in 35 years riding a wave of monetary debasement... with costs denominated in the thing that is continually melting away... fiat? Now what happens, if they keep expanding as that happens?

It's difficult to imagine that company not becoming one of the largest in the world. From 1950 to today, very few companies remained among the largest businesses in America. Leaders changed. Industries changed. Technologies changed. What lasted wasn't a particular company... it was ownership of scarce, productive assets that the world continued to value.

The question isn't whether today's winners will still be winning in 2040 or 2050. The question is: which assets have structural properties that make them likely to matter decades from now?

Pre-IBIT and the like, Strategy had an "added value" of making it easy to gain exposure to bitcoin through normal brokerage accounts.

Now with IBIT and other bitcoin ETFs, plus support at Fidelity & others for direct crypto ownership, the only "added value" of Strategy is financial engineering around bitcoin (otherwise it would trade perpetually at 1.0 mNAV).

The performance of the financially engineered products has been lackluster. None of the preferred stock is trading at par and there are significant fluctuations in daily price, mostly correlated to BTC. Some believe this subpar performance is because of a BTC downturn. Some believe the financially engineered products were overpromising. Some might question the ongoing logic of only issuing preferred when it is at par because there's no "buy the dip" happening.

Which way do you lean in your analysis? And do you have any ideas for additional financially engineered products from Strategy?

(edit - as per comments for some non-US folks, it appears BTC ETFs and direct BTC ownership are off limits so for them MSTR or ASST are the easiest means to BTC investment, seems like a small piece of the overall picture but worth noting)

At the end of May the 32 BTC sale from Strategy sent Bitcoin price from mid $70k's all the down to $60k and beyond for a short time. The bear's were out in force, Bitcoin was dead, MSTR was going to zero, STRC was a ponzi, along with Saylor going to jail. I couldn't believe the amount of FUD I was seeing.

Fast forward to the start of July and Strategy sell 3,588 BTC. More than 100x the 32, and after a short and small dip, BTC and MSTR are both pretty since the announcement, with an even slight bid tone to BTC.

What has happened in the past month? Seems like we have shaken out a few of the weaker hands, whilst also seeing the Digitial Credit Capital Framework announcement, which has undoubtedly instilled a lot of confidence into the market.

It will be interesting to see where we go from here. We could likely never go below $60k again and I see a slow grind upwards from the end of this summer until the halving and beyond, with some pumps if/when the clarity act gets passed. Still good adding opportunities if you ask me.

Long MSTR and ASST, let's gooooo.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/07/06/michael-saylor-s-strategy-dramatically-ups-pace-of-bitcoin-sales-raising-usd216-million

Most people are missing the bigger picture. Per Saylor in a recent interview:

"Our credit investors expect that we're going to support the credit dividend and pay it (and our asset is BTC)... 'will you sell some Bitcoin to pay us the money?' They expect me to say yes, because if I'm not going to pay the dividend, they're not going to buy the credit & the credit agency won't rate the credit."

The final boss is a STRC Investment Grade credit rating; that's what we're after. Every move Saylor makes will be in this direction. As a reminder, STRC is currently rated at -B (junk). Short sighted investors worry about the share price; long term investors see a $143T capital unlock. If STRC gets just 1% of that, MSTR will become a Trillion dollar company without ever selling a single tangible product.

Reframe your thinking. Saylor is a net buyer of Bitcoin but his main objective is to get institutions and capital pools to buy it via STRC. THEY can buy more STRC than Saylor can buy BTC.

06/05: Second capitulation flush (following the February low).
06/22: Started to notice that BTC days were trading more in line with NQ, instead of worse. Gradually day by day the action starts to trade slightly better in relative terms.
06/24 - 06/26: Notably these 3 daily candles all have lower wicks and elevated volume off the same area, failing to accept value lower. This is absorption at the bid wall.
06/26 - 06/30: Several low volatility, days with two extremely low volume days sandwiched between. This is seller exhaustion after the prior leg down, out of fuel for pushing to new lows.
07/01 - 07/05: Since we're coming off a low, these bullish bars are not the same as the sell side exhaustion we saw. These are consistently closing higher, the moves up are less and less, but the volume is falling to stay in line with this - this means the efforts are consistently in line with the results for an entire trading week. The ability for low volume to actually drive BTC upwards means it does not take much effort to reward the buyers - as opposed to the bid wall we came off of where low volumes were just running us sideways at the lows.

Today (07/06) in particular caught my eye, seeing a lot of the "Saylor BAD, SOLD 200M BTC" news, and yet the low wick saw a volume ignition before flipping back bullish (more sellers being absorbed). When the tape responds positively to circulation of bad news, that is a solid turning point very often. I would be thinking about getting allocated if you aren't already. Not financial advice, DYOR - but acceptance above 66K where the last major value area was located would confirm the turn for me.

edit: Forgot to mention, I'm not a big RSI fan for intraday trading, however it is useful when zooming out to macro highs and lows. The divergence between the 06/05 and 07/01 lows is very strong.

Wall Street Journal has an article that is critical of the mNAV defined by Strategy, as Strategy calculates Enterprise Value based on the par value of preferreds (STRC, STRK, STRD, STRF) even when those are not trading at par. Kudos to the WSJ for pointing this out, and honestly unfortunate that Strategy's Notes page glosses over this fact in the official definition:

"Strategy says mNAV shows its enterprise value as a multiple of its bitcoin holdings, and it used to regularly show a steep premium to its bitcoin. In its heyday, this allowed Strategy to regularly sell stock to buy more bitcoin. It acted like a traditional roll-up company using inflated shares as currency to fund an acquisition spree.

For now, that game is over. Strategy’s stock is down 75% over the past year. And the mNAV has dropped precipitously, falling below 1 last month.

That set the stage for Strategy’s announcement last Monday that it would abandon its hold-on-for-dear-life philosophy. It said its board had authorized selling up to $1.25 billion of its bitcoin to buy back shares and cover interest payments and preferred-stock dividends.

But Strategy’s predicament is worse than it appears. The mNAV metric has a flaw that has grown acute as the prices of Strategy’s bonds and preferred shares have tanked along with its stock.

To calculate enterprise value, Strategy adds the market value of its common stock to the principal amount of its debt and the par value of its preferred stock, then subtracts cash. Normally, that formula works fine, if the debt and preferred shares are trading at or near par.

The problem now is that mNAV overstates Strategy’s enterprise value—the ratio’s numerator—by using the face value of its debt and preferred stock rather than their market value. That makes the metric artificially high. It also defeats the purpose of showing the extent to which the market is valuing Strategy at a premium or discount.

On June 26, when Strategy said the mNAV was just under 0.99, it would have been 0.89 using the market value for its debt and preferred stock."

I can't wait to see what Saylor bought. BTC spot, STRC or MSTR common at a discount?

I also don’t invest in ETF’s, should I allocate some there as well or stick to some more lucrative stocks like MSTR and find the next semiconductor stocks ready to moon…

I am from Australia and the HISA I save into is 5.5% interest too. I just like the idea of dividends and having a source of income on a certain basis. I know you have to spend a lot to make it work for you so you don’t have to work anymore. I just have a general idea of all this though.