Why Strategy Is Selling Bitcoin at a Loss, Every Few Weeks, to Pay a Bill
6 min read
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6 min read
Strategy is selling bitcoin. Again. This week the company sold 1,638 BTC for about $104.73 million, an average of $63,957 per coin, according to its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Here is the number that matters most. Strategy's average purchase price across everything it owns is $75,419 per bitcoin. So it sold this week's coins for roughly $11,462 less than it paid.
It sold at a loss. On purpose. And this is the third time in about ten weeks.
This is the same company whose whole identity was that it would never sell.
Three sales, in about ten weeks.
| When | Bitcoin sold | Money raised | Average price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Late May 2026 | 32 BTC | ~$2.5 million | $77,135 |
| Late June to early July 2026 | 3,588 BTC | ~$216 million | roughly $60,200 |
| Early August 2026 | 1,638 BTC | ~$104.73 million | $63,957 |
The first one was tiny, just 32 coins. But it was the first time Strategy had ever reported a net reduction in its bitcoin. That was the moment the story changed.
After the latest sale, Strategy holds 842,138 BTC, down from 843,775.
The answer is simpler than most of the coverage makes it sound.
Strategy needed money to buy bitcoin. So it raised money by selling something called preferred stock. Preferred stock is a bit like a loan that never has to be repaid, but which pays the holder a fixed cash amount forever. Strategy sold four different versions of it, known by their ticker symbols STRK, STRF, STRD and STRC.
Those payments are called dividends, and they are due in cash, on schedule, regardless of what bitcoin does.
Strategy's preferred stock dividends now exceed $1.5 billion a year.
That bill arrives whether bitcoin goes up, sideways or down. And here is the problem at the centre of everything:
That is the whole story. Everything else is detail.
The filing is specific about the latest sale, and it splits almost exactly in half:
Strategy also raised $290.6 million in the same period by selling more than 3 million of its ordinary shares. About $250 million of that went into its cash reserve, which now sits at roughly $4 billion.
So it is doing both at once: selling shares and selling bitcoin, and using the cash to pay dividends and shore up its reserve.
Forget the company for a second. There is a lesson here that applies to an ordinary portfolio, and it is not a small one.
A fixed bill plus a volatile asset that pays you nothing equals selling at the worst possible time.
Strategy is not selling because it wants to. It is selling because the dividend is due in cash and bitcoin does not generate cash. When bitcoin is down, that forces a sale at a low price. The obligation does not care about the price.
Now look at your own situation. If you hold crypto and you also have a fixed monthly commitment, a loan payment, school fees, anything that must be paid in cash on a date, you are running a smaller version of the same structure. And you will face the same outcome: the month you most need the money is often the month the asset is worth least.
This is not an argument against holding volatile assets. It is an argument for never putting a fixed obligation and a volatile asset in the same plan without cash in between them.
We covered the sizing side of this in how much crypto is too much, and the reason bitcoin cannot be relied on to hold value on your schedule in what actually held its value when inflation spiked.
Not on these numbers, and it is worth being accurate about that.
The sales are small relative to what it owns. 1,638 coins out of 842,138 is about 0.19% of the stack. All three sales together are well under 1%. The cash reserve went up to around $4 billion, not down.
What has genuinely changed is the story, not the solvency. For years Strategy was treated as a simple way to own bitcoin through the stock market. It now behaves like a company that manages a balance sheet, buying when it can raise cheap money and selling when a bill is due.
Three things, none of which require an opinion on bitcoin's price.
NetWort tracks your real cost basis across crypto, stocks and metals in one place, and shows how much of your gain or loss is the asset moving versus the exchange rate moving. You can see the wider market backdrop on the market page.