Technique (previously MicroStrategy) reported earnings this week with founder Michael Saylor specializing in monetary abstraction throughout an hour-long webinar.
Whereas he offered fundamental metrics concerning the firm’s fourth-quarter efficiency, he centered totally on renaming shareholder dilution with phrases like “BTC Gain.”
In a daisy chain of monetary complexity, Technique has managed to dilute shareholders by specializing in summary monetary fashions that target the amount of bitcoin (BTC) per share fairly than the explanation for that amount.
The extra time buyers spend doing calculations and forecasts, the much less time they’ve left to ponder the supply of the info itself.
Though it operates a declining enterprise software program enterprise that (price lower than $3 billion earlier than the corporate’s August 2020 pivot to BTC) Technique’s $85 billion market cap in the present day virtually totally derives from its $46 billion price of the world’s main crypto.
That 84% premium of the corporate’s market cap above its BTC is actual, and buyers colloquially discuss with it as an “asset premium” or “multiple-to-net asset value” (mNAV). At publication time, Technique’s mNAV is 1.84X.
For a wide range of causes, together with the power of the extremely unstable firm to promote attractively priced company bonds with liquid hedges for brief gross sales, Technique has traded at a premium to its BTC holdings for a number of years.
Its mNAV was greater than 3.4X as just lately as November 2024.
This premium that buyers pay for Technique shares above its BTC holdings funds virtually every little thing else that occupies mindshare on Wall Avenue: accounting fashions, choices pricing, company bond yields, share conversions, and key efficiency indicators (KPIs) like Saylor’s newly-introduced BTC Yield, BTC Acquire, and BTC $ Acquire.
All of those unique phrases have the fundamental mNAV to thank for his or her constructive existence and efficiency.
Learn extra: Is MicroStrategy’s $563M STRK actually oversubscribed?
The corporate additionally listed a brand new kind of dividend-yielding convertible most popular share on the Nasdaq, STRK, additional complicating calculations about how a lot BTC to which frequent Technique buyers have declare.
Give attention to the BTC Acquire and BTC $ Acquire
BTC Acquire and BTC $ Acquire are merely calculations that derive from Technique’s issuance of dilutive devices that seize its mNAV. This derives from buyers being prepared to pay extra for Technique than the BTC it holds.
The primary KPI that’s an abstraction of this company seize is BTC Yield, which is the proportion change in BTC holdings to Technique’s assumed diluted shares excellent. In different phrases, BTC Yield is the quantity of additional BTC per share that shareholders obtain over time on account of Technique itself promoting to seize a number of the market’s mNAV.
The subsequent layer of KPI abstraction is Technique’s BTC Acquire. Particularly, for the complete 12 months 2024, the corporate’s BTC Acquire was 140,538. It calculates this because the variety of BTC held at the start of a interval multiplied by the BTC Yield for such interval.
In different phrases, it’s only a mathematical by-product of the above BTC Yield.
Equally, the third KPI abraction, BTC $ Acquire, is yet one more mathematical by-product of the above BTC Yield.
BTC $ Acquire is the greenback worth of the BTC Acquire multiplied by the market value of bitcoin.
Technique has forecasted a 2025 full-year BTC $ Acquire of $10 billion.
BTC Yield is the proportion change in BTC holdings to Technique’s assumed diluted shares excellent.
With the revealing of a brand new title, STRK inventory itemizing, and numerous KPI metrics which might be largely mathematically interrelated, Saylor is reiterating his multi-decade energy in complicated monetary abstraction.
Dashboards for buyers monitoring his inventory now monitor dozens of figures to make sense of the a number of tiers of fairness and valuation metrics that apply to an funding choice in MSTR.