Strategy Shares Fall to 4-Month Low as STRC Dips and Bitcoin Sinks Under $60K

Strategy felt the bite of crypto winter particularly hard on Friday as the Bitcoin-buying firm’s shares slid to a four-month low and Bitcoin fell below the $60,000 mark.

The Tysons Corner, Virginia-based firm’s stock price dropped as low as $114, hitting its lowest level since early February, according to Yahoo Finance, though it rebounded to $120 to finish the trading day—still down nearly 7%.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin plunged as low as $59,227, CoinGecko data showed—the lowest price seen since 2024—but has risen back to $60,311, down about 5% in the last 24 hours.

The company led by co-founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor faced scrutiny this week after selling Bitcoin for the first time since 2022—an attempt to “inoculate” the market to the idea that Strategy could pare its holdings to pay dividends on its flagship preferred stock.

The product known as Stretch (STRC), which currently offers an 11.5% annual dividend paid monthly, wavered on Friday. The preferred stock dropped 3.6% to $93, pulling further away from the $100 par value that STRC is designed to trade at.

STRC has fallen as low as $90.38 since the company established it as an alternative way to raise proceeds to buy Bitcoin last July. Since STRC’s $2.5 billion IPO, the preferred stock has ballooned to a market cap of $9.55 billion, alongside its recurring costs.

A decline in STRC may put some pressure on the Bitcoin-buying firm, but the pullback “isn’t a real concern for Strategy,” Benchmark-StoneX analyst Mark Palmer told Decrypt on Wednesday—before the preferred stock’s latest fall.

“The pullback in STRC is well within the range we’d expect,” he added. “We saw the same thing last month, when STRC dipped to about $97 and then rebounded toward $99 within days.”

Strategy has signaled that when STRC trades above its $100 par value, it will issue more of the preferred stock and buy more Bitcoin. When it trades below the threshold, the firm has indicated that it can increase STRC’s dividend in an attempt to bolster demand.

“Its monthly rate-reset mechanism exists precisely to pull the price back to par,” Palmer added, noting that the product’s dividend has remained unchanged over the past four months.

Other analysts have described Strategy’s liquidation, totaling 32 Bitcoin for $2.5 million, as negligible given that the company’s stockpile is worth $50.4 billion. However, the move contrasted with the buy-and-never-sell mantra that Saylor had long promoted.

When Strategy disclosed its Bitcoin sale on Monday, the company said that it had spent $63.9 billion on the digital asset since transforming itself years ago. In an echo of paper losses seen earlier this year, the company’s holdings were $13.7 billion underwater on Friday.

As the company’s holdings came under pressure last year, Strategy earmarked $2.25 billion to ensure that it could continue to make distributions on STRC. Still, the company took a 61% chunk out of those reserves when repurchasing debt last month.