Strategy Opposes MSCI Proposal, Says Bitcoin Treasury Firms Are Being Targeted a Second Time

Morgan Stanley Capital International is considering rules that could remove Strategy from its global equity indexes. The bitcoin treasury says the company is unfairly targeting digital asset treasuries. ” Writing in a letter to MSCI Monday, the Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin behemoth’s founder, Michael Saylor, and CEO, Phong Le, said that the company was discriminating against digital asset businesses.

MSCI said earlier this month that it was consulting on a plan to define “non-operating companies” and make them ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes. The removal of such companies would exclude firms like Strategy from indexes visible to a large pool of institutional investors. Strategy responded today to MSCI’s proposed “non-operating company” exclusion.

While not material to $MSTR, the proposal is misguided, flawed, and conflicts with established securities laws and accounting principles. co/Vup3T5TbvY MSCI’s latest proposal comes after the company in 2025 proposed excluding from its indices all companies whose digital-asset holdings represent 50% or more of total assets. “MSCI’s continued effort to discriminate against digital assets is misguided and calls into question MSCI’s neutrality and reliability,” Strategy’s letter read.

It added: “The proposal, like the 2025 proposal that MSCI withdrew, is discriminatory, arbitrary, and misguided. If adopted, the proposal would have no meaningful impact on Strategy’s business, but it would profoundly harm MSCI’s reputation as a reliable and neutral index provider. ” Strategy argued that MSCI was relying on unprecedented classifications to define Bitcoin as a “non-operating” asset.

Strategy said it reports its Bitcoin business as an operating segment and its Bitcoin gains and losses as operating expenses. The company said that MSCI’s methodology for targeting “non-operating companies” was “arbitrary and unexplained,” and was just a way of unfairly targeting digital asset treasuries. ” Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — is an enterprise software company that pivoted to buying and holding bitcoin in 2020.

8 billion at today’s prices. Investors can buy Strategy’s Nasdaq-listed stock (MSTR) to get heightened exposure to bitcoin’s performance. MSTR closed Monday trading 4% higher.

Year-to-date, the stock is down 15%.