Strategy Paid $80,318 a Coin for 4,603 Bitcoin — More Than Bitcoin Closed at on Any Day It Was Buying — and the Tranche Is Already $6 Million Underwater

Strategy ended a ten-week pause on Monday morning. An 8-K filed with the SEC on 31 August disclosed that the company bought 4,603 bitcoin between 24 and 30 August for approximately $369.7 million, at an average price of $80,318 per coin, inclusive of fees and expenses. It was the first purchase since 22 June, when it added 520 coins, and it lifts the holding to 845,050 BTC at an aggregate cost of $63.73 billion and an average of $75,412 a coin. The filing followed a post by executive chairman Michael Saylor on Sunday carrying the caption “We’re ₿ack,” which The Block, Benzinga and CoinDesk all read, correctly, as a tell.

The arithmetic of the disclosure checks out to the dollar: 4,603 × $80,318 = $369,703,754, which is the “approximately $369.7 million” in the filing, and 840,447 + 4,603 = 845,050. That is the easy part, and it is where almost all of Monday’s coverage stopped. The question nobody asked is whether $80,318 was a good price for the week Strategy was actually buying in. It was not.

Bitcoin did not close above $80,318 on any day in the purchase window

The filing names the window precisely — 24 August through 30 August 2026 — which makes the comparison a matter of pulling seven daily candles rather than a matter of opinion. Here they are, from our own Binance BTCUSDT pull, with the disclosed average alongside.

Binance BTCUSDT daily candles, own pull, 1 September 2026, 06:10 UTC. Daily VWAP is quote volume divided by base volume. Window VWAP is total quote volume divided by total base volume across all seven days — 24 through 30 August inclusive, seven candles, 121,689.27 BTC. An earlier internal pass on this figure ran eight candles by including 31 August and was corrected before publication.

The highest daily close in the entire window was $80,249.58, on 27 August — $68 below what Strategy paid on average. The highest single-day VWAP was $79,761.91, also on the 27th, $556 below it. To average $80,318 across a week whose volume-weighted price was $78,930.87, a buyer has to be filled disproportionately in the upper wicks: the window did trade as high as $81,478.87 intraday on 28 August, so the prints exist, but they are a thin sliver of 121,689 coins of volume.

Put in dollars, the gap between $80,318 and the window’s own average trade is $1,387.13 a coin, or $6.385 million across 4,603 coins. That is not a scandal and it is not a rounding error. It is what it costs to buy roughly $370 million of bitcoin inside seven days without patience — and it is a number every holder of MSTR is entitled to see, because it is the difference between the price the company paid and the price the market was clearing at while it paid.

The new coins are underwater. The old ones are not.

At $79,014.01 on Binance at 06:10 UTC on 1 September, the tranche bought last week is worth $6.002 million less than it cost — down 1.624%. It has been underwater since the moment it was disclosed.

The full position tells the opposite story, and both facts are true at once. 845,050 coins at an average of $75,412 are worth $66.771 billion against $63.727 billion of cost — a paper gain of $3.044 billion, or 4.776%. A month ago that same position was more than ten billion dollars in the red. What changed was not Strategy’s buying; it was a 25.078% August, measured on Bitstamp from the 1 August open of $62,817.96 to the 31 August close of $78,571.17.

Own computation, 1 September 2026, 06:10 UTC, at the Binance BTCUSDT spot price of $79,014.01. Cost figures from the 31 August 8-K.

One number worth keeping: each $1,000 move in the bitcoin price now changes the value of Strategy’s holding by $845.1 million. That constant rises every time the company buys, and it is the single most useful thing a reader can carry away from any of these filings.

Only 61.3% of the money raised went into bitcoin

The purchase was funded from at-the-market sales of Class A common stock. Strategy sold 4,531,421 MSTR shares for approximately $602.8 million during the period. Where the proceeds went is the more revealing disclosure:

Figures as disclosed in the 31 August 8-K. Percentages and the residual are our own computation: the four named uses sum to $602.2m against $602.8m raised.

A week ago this desk reported that Strategy had sold $2.01 billion of stock in a week and bought zero bitcoin, and before that that its monetisation programme had sold 6,916 coins at an average of $62,078. Monday’s filing does not reverse that shift so much as split the difference. The company is buying bitcoin again, but it is spending nearly two dollars in five on servicing and retiring its own preferred stock. A pure accumulation vehicle does not have a line item for dividends.

What we got wrong, and what everyone else did

Yesterday this desk published that the cost basis figure circulating in coverage — $75,653 — was $225 million too high, and that dividing the 24 August 8-K’s own $63.36 billion by its own 840,447 coins returned $75,388. Monday’s filing settles it in our favour: $63.36bn plus $369,703,754 over 845,050 coins is $75,415.31, against a disclosed $75,412. The $3.31 gap is rounding in the published $63.36 billion, not a discrepancy. We are printing the check because we asked others to run it.

The figure we would flag in Monday’s coverage is the position value. Several outlets put the 845,050 coins at “around $66.1 billion”, which was right at Monday’s intraday price and is $671 million light at Tuesday morning’s. It is a clock problem rather than an error, but a treasury this size revalues by $845.1 million per $1,000, and any dollar figure attached to it is stale within hours of publication. That is the argument for quoting the coin count and the basis, and letting the reader multiply.

The marker

As standing practice we mark one falsifiable claim on this. H1: bitcoin records a daily close at or above $80,318 — Strategy’s disclosed average for this tranche — on or before 30 September 2026, settled on Bitstamp BTC/USD daily closes. At the 1 September Bitstamp print of $78,979.03 that requires +1.695%. It has been done twice in the last thirty days: 27 August closed at $80,278.98 and 25 August traded to $81,255.06 intraday before closing lower. The bar is the company’s own entry price, which makes the marker exactly as hard as the question “did they buy well.”

Method: prices, funding, open interest, basis and on-chain figures in this article are pulled directly by Bitcoin Mastery at the timestamp stated — Bitstamp BTC/USD daily candles for closes and monthly returns, Binance BTCUSDT spot and perpetual for intraday and derivatives, Binance COIN-M quarterly contracts for basis, mempool.space for difficulty, hashrate and fees, alternative.me for the Fear & Greed series, Farside Investors’ all-data table for ETF flows and US Treasury CMT par yields for rates. Volume-weighted average prices are computed from Binance daily quote volume divided by base volume. Where a third-party figure is cited we name the source and its date; where two sources disagree we print both. Every streak or extreme figure is published with the first date of its series in the same sentence.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are volatile and you can lose money. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security, including MSTR, STRC or any exchange-traded fund. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.