MicroStrategy Stock Hits Nearly Two-Year High

By Ryan Ozawa

Shares of Bitcoin-bull enterprise business firm MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) closed comfortably above $500 on Black Friday, a high-water mark it hasn't seen since December 2021, amassing a market cap of $7.33 billion, according to the New York-based tech-heavy exchange.

MicroStrategy's long strategy on holding the top cryptocurrency has proven to be a winning one. Although it started the year with a quarterly loss, its stock price doubled within a month. The company is one of the largest institutional holders of Bitcoin, which its founder and chairman Michael Saylor started buying in August 2020 as a hedge against inflation.

"That’s why all of us are fairly bullish over the next 12 months,” Saylor told CNBC.  “Demand’s going to increase, supply’s going to contract, and this is fairly unprecedented in the history of Wall Street.”

The news only got better from there. By April, MicroStrategy's Bitcoin holdings were in the green, The price of Bitcoin rose above $30,000, and with the purchase of 1,045 additional Bitcoin—increasing its total holdings to 140,000 Bitcoin—the average purchase price of the more than $4 billion in the digital asset fell to $29,803 per coin.

Its second-quarter earnings report brought with it a $24 million Bitcoin impairment charge, but MicroStrategy as a company was profitable again, and the largest publicly traded company with Bitcoin on its balance sheet continued buying BTC, amassing 152,800 coins worth about $4.4 billion.

At this point, even though Bitcoin was making a comeback, the stock of companies with Bitcoin exposure performed even better than the cryptocurrency itself—which was already up 87% this year.

While its most recent quarterly report issued in early November, the company posted a net loss of $143.4 million—a much deeper shade of red than the $27 million loss reported in the same period last year. And yet, MicroStrategy kept buying Bitcoin: another 6,067 Bitcoin was acquired for $167 million.

The company now holds approximately 0.75% of Bitcoin's total circulating supply.

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