What is Strategy (MSTR)? The bitcoin treasury company, explained

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy, ticker MSTR) is a company whose share price is driven almost entirely by one thing: the bitcoin sitting on its balance sheet. Grasp that single fact and most of how the stock behaves falls into place.

From software company to bitcoin treasury

In August 2020, MicroStrategy made its first corporate bitcoin purchase and declared bitcoin its primary treasury reserve asset. What started as a cash-management decision became the company's defining strategy — it kept buying, funded those purchases with new capital, and eventually rebranded to Strategy. Today the legacy software business is a footnote next to the treasury.

How the stock actually trades

Because the balance sheet is mostly bitcoin, MSTR moves with bitcoin — but not one-for-one. Two forces pull it away from the coin:

• A premium (or discount). The market often values MSTR above the bitcoin it holds. That gap is measured by mNAV — market value divided by the value of the bitcoin. What is mNAV? walks through the math.
• Leverage. Strategy funds bitcoin buys with debt and preferred stock, which amplifies moves in both directions — see why MSTR outperforms in bull markets and underperforms in drawdowns.

Here are bitcoin and MSTR since the treasury era began, each indexed to 100 at the start:

Why not just buy bitcoin?

A fair question — and the honest answer is it depends. MSTR trades in an ordinary brokerage or retirement account with no keys to manage, but you pay a premium and take on corporate risk. Owning bitcoin directly means self-custody and no premium, but the responsibility is yours. We weigh both paths in MSTR vs holding bitcoin directly and MSTR vs a spot bitcoin ETF.

The numbers that matter

Three live figures tell most of the story, and all of them sit on the MSTR deep-data page:

• Bitcoin holdings — how many coins the treasury owns.
• mNAV — how large a premium (or discount) you're paying over that bitcoin.
• Bitcoin per share — the honest per-share exposure, and whether new capital raises are adding to it.

Bottom line

MSTR is not a software stock and not quite a bitcoin fund — it's a leveraged, premium-carrying wrapper around a growing pile of bitcoin. Once you know that, the rest is just reading the premium and the per-share math.