(Bloomberg) -- MicroStrategy Inc. is accelerating its pace of Bitcoin buying by increasing the amount of convertible notes it’s selling by almost 50% to fund additional purchases of the cryptocurrency.
The once obscure software maker, which now calls itself a Bitcoin Treasury company, is moving rapidly to meet a goal announced last month of raising $42 billion in capital over the next three years to buy more Bitcoin. MicroStrategy said Monday that it bought a record $4.6 billion of the tokens, funded through an at-the—market stock share program. It will use the $2.6 billion raised from the 0% senior note offering to add to its roughly $31 billion stockpile.
Along with the renewed enthusiasm around Bitcoin since crypto cheerleader Donald Trump won the US presidential election, the purchases have sent the shares of MicroStrategy skyrocketing. The stock is up by more than 600% this year. That has swelled the company’s market value to more than $100 billion, putting it near the ranks of the 100 biggest companies in the S&P 500.
“MicroStrategy is effectively a levered play on Bitcoin and the outperformance of its shares relative to Bitcoin is the product of that approach,” said Benchmark Co. analyst Mark Palmer.
Bitcoin climbed to a record high of almost $95,000 after MicroStrategy, which is the largest publicly traded owner of Bitcoin, announced the upsized note offering. MicroStrategy jumped as much as 16% to a record $499.35.
Adding to the stock surge is demand for leveraged exchange-traded funds based on the crypto-centric company. The firms offering the funds have to gain expose to the company with demand for the ETFs surging. The T-Rex 2X Long MSTR Daily Target ETF (ticker: MSTU), which offers double the exposure on MicroStrategy and is widely considered to be the most volatile fund available to US investors, has jumped 960% while seeing massive inflows.
MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor said on an October call with analysts that the company plans to accelerate its treasury operations and acquire Bitcoin continually with the goal of having 1.5 times the leverage of Bitcoin.
As part of this plan, MicroStrategy said half of the capital would be coming from equity, while the other half would be from fixed income securities.
The company sold 13.6 million shares into the market through the at-the-market program in the week ending Nov. 17. Earlier in November the company announced an additional $2 billion of net proceeds from share sales.
--With assistance from Vildana Hajric.
(Adds leveraged ETFs information in the sixth paragraph.)
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