1. A 67 % share-price drop that dwarfs BTC’s 15 % slide

MicroStrategy (MSTR) has fallen from $474 to $177 (-67 %) while Bitcoin slipped only 15 % from $100 k to $85 k.

The market’s willingness to pay a premium for its BTC vault has evaporated: mNAV (market-cap / net-asset-value) has compressed from 2.5 × to barely 1.1 ×.

The “issue shares → buy coins → stock rallies → repeat” flywheel is now a zero-sum game.

2. The sword hanging over the stock: MSCI’s 50 % rule

MSCI—gatekeeper of the world’s most-tracked equity benchmarks—labels any company whose digital-asset holdings exceed 50 % of total assets as an “investment fund”, making it ineligible for standard equity indices.

MSTR’s balance-sheet is 77 % Bitcoin (~$56 bn of $73 bn total assets), squarely above the threshold .

If MSCI pulls the plug on 15 Jan 2026, passive vehicles tracking MSCI USA, Nasdaq-100 and Russell 2000 must divest roughly $28 bn of stock; add parallel reviews by FTSE/Russell and Nasdaq and the total forced selling could reach $88 bn .

With average daily turnover of ~$48 bn, an $88 bn one-way liquidation would equal almost two full days of volume—enough to blow out bid-ask spreads from 0.2 % to 2-5 %.

3. Precedent: from flagship to orphan

History shows index removals are merciless.

When GE was dropped from the Dow in 2018 the stock fell another 30 % in the following month; when Grayscale’s GBTC lost its ETF monopoly it flipped from a +40 % premium to a –30 % discount and never recovered.

Analysts already price in a post-index liquidity discount: MSTR now trades roughly at par to its BTC stash, a level that removes any accretion from future equity issuance.

4. Saylor’s defence—and the market’s reply

CEO Michael Saylor argues MSTR is an operating business (“a $500 m software company that happens to own Bitcoin”) and points to five listed digital-security offerings as proof of active treasury engineering .

Investors are unmoved: the stock’s beta to BTC has actually risen above 2.5 as traders hedge the potential index exile.

Meanwhile $7 bn of convertibles with strike prices between $143 and $672 begin to look like pure debt if the share price stays sub-$180, raising the spectre of a “double-dip” where both valuation and earnings-per-share metrics deteriorate simultaneously.

5. Red-line anxiety spreads to the DAT pack

MSCI has put 38 crypto-heavy issuers on watch; together they control >1 % of the free-float value of global small-cap indices.

The message is binary: stay under 50 % and keep the passive bid, or cross the line and live in the liquidity wilderness.

For the broader “print-shares-buy-coins” industry, the free lunch appears to be over—five years after Saylor invented it, a footnote in an index methodology file may finish it off .

1. A 67 % share-price drop that dwarfs BTC’s 15 % slide

MicroStrategy (MSTR) has fallen from $474 to $177 (-67 %) while Bitcoin slipped only 15 % from $100 k to $85 k.

The market’s willingness to pay a premium for its BTC vault has evaporated: mNAV (market-cap / net-asset-value) has compressed from 2.5 × to barely 1.1 ×.

The “issue shares → buy coins → stock rallies → repeat” flywheel is now a zero-sum game.

2. The sword hanging over the stock: MSCI’s 50 % rule

MSCI—gatekeeper of the world’s most-tracked equity benchmarks—labels any company whose digital-asset holdings exceed 50 % of total assets as an “investment fund”, making it ineligible for standard equity indices.

MSTR’s balance-sheet is 77 % Bitcoin (~$56 bn of $73 bn total assets), squarely above the threshold .

If MSCI pulls the plug on 15 Jan 2026, passive vehicles tracking MSCI USA, Nasdaq-100 and Russell 2000 must divest roughly $28 bn of stock; add parallel reviews by FTSE/Russell and Nasdaq and the total forced selling could reach $88 bn .

With average daily turnover of ~$48 bn, an $88 bn one-way liquidation would equal almost two full days of volume—enough to blow out bid-ask spreads from 0.2 % to 2-5 %.

3. Precedent: from flagship to orphan

History shows index removals are merciless.

When GE was dropped from the Dow in 2018 the stock fell another 30 % in the following month; when Grayscale’s GBTC lost its ETF monopoly it flipped from a +40 % premium to a –30 % discount and never recovered.

Analysts already price in a post-index liquidity discount: MSTR now trades roughly at par to its BTC stash, a level that removes any accretion from future equity issuance.

4. Saylor’s defence—and the market’s reply

CEO Michael Saylor argues MSTR is an operating business (“a $500 m software company that happens to own Bitcoin”) and points to five listed digital-security offerings as proof of active treasury engineering .

Investors are unmoved: the stock’s beta to BTC has actually risen above 2.5 as traders hedge the potential index exile.

Meanwhile $7 bn of convertibles with strike prices between $143 and $672 begin to look like pure debt if the share price stays sub-$180, raising the spectre of a “double-dip” where both valuation and earnings-per-share metrics deteriorate simultaneously.

5. Red-line anxiety spreads to the DAT pack

MSCI has put 38 crypto-heavy issuers on watch; together they control >1 % of the free-float value of global small-cap indices.

The message is binary: stay under 50 % and keep the passive bid, or cross the line and live in the liquidity wilderness.

For the broader “print-shares-buy-coins” industry, the free lunch appears to be over—five years after Saylor invented it, a footnote in an index methodology file may finish it off .