MicroStrategy Stock Plummets as It Buys More Bitcoins

MicroStrategy announced on Friday it bought just over $10 million worth of additional bitcoins, just days after finalizing another purchase of more than $15 million. The company’s share price, however, shed by more than 11 percent in today’s trades as of writing.

The Nasdaq-listed business intelligence firm, which has been doubling down on its cryptocurrency bet over the last year, paid an average price of $48,888 for each bitcoin, including fees.

Its acquisition of approximately 205 bitcoins puts Virginia-based company’s total holdings of the digital token at 91,064, which were acquired at total cost of $2.20 billion and average price of $24,119 per bitcoin. At the current price, Microstrategy’s bitcoins are worth more than $4.4 billion.

The business intelligence giant, Headed by crypto bull, Michael Saylor, had previously sold debts worth more than $1.2 billion for the explicit purpose of purchasing Bitcoin.

MicroStrategy has good reason to do that again. The publicly-listed company’s share price shot up by approximately 580 percent as MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin bet has turned into a profitable one. The price of Bitcoin rose from $11,000 in August, when it made its first crypto purchase via Coinbase’s institutional service, to just shy of the $60,000 level last month.

In 2020, the company bought an aggregate of 70,470 bitcoins, which were acquired at an aggregate cost of $1.1 billion or average purchase price of $15,964 per coin, well below current levels.

For reference, MicroStrategy’s market cap stands at $5.8 billion as of Friday, meaning the company places nearly 70% of its net value in Bitcoin.

MicroStrategy CEO Saylor, who is now an avid bitcoin advocate, was said to be the one who convinced Elon Musk to move $1.5 billion dollars of Tesla’s funds into bitcoin. Although the big party started after the news of the Tesla purchase and its acceptance of Bitcoin as a form of payment, the electric vehicle maker was not the first heavyweight firm to convert a portion of its cash into bitcoin.

When a wave of institutional investors started to warm to Bitcoin through the second half of 2020, Payment startup, Square and other Wall Street whales including Microstrategy adopted the policy of placing their cash surpluses into crypto.

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