Bitcoin closed Friday, August 21 at $78,335.19, up 21.11% from its Tuesday, August 18 close of $64,680.71, per Yahoo Finance daily history pulled Saturday, August 22 at 12:40 UTC. MSTR, the common stock of Strategy Inc, a software company that converted its balance sheet into a bitcoin holding vehicle and owned 840,447 BTC as of Sunday, August 16, closed the same three sessions at $119.25 against $92.52. That is a gain of 28.89%, taken from MSTR's dated session history at stockanalysis.com and pulled at the same hour.
The broad market sat the whole thing out. SPY lost 0.23% across the identical three sessions and QQQ lost 0.57%, while NVDA fell 2.28%.
So bitcoin moved 21%, two of the equities built on top of it moved further still, and the index containing them went nowhere. The gap between 21.11% and 28.89% is not sentiment and it is not luck. It is arithmetic, and the same arithmetic runs in reverse.
The Three Sessions, Ticker by Ticker
Every figure below is a close-to-close move from the Tuesday, August 18 settle to the Friday, August 21 settle. No intraday extremes, no weekend quotes.
|
Ticker
|
Aug 18 close
|
Aug 21 close
|
3-session change
|
|
MSTR
|
$92.52
|
$119.25
|
+28.89%
|
|
COIN
|
$146.23
|
$186.49
|
+27.53%
|
|
BTC
|
$64,680.71
|
$78,335.19
|
+21.11%
|
|
HOOD
|
$91.53
|
$108.13
|
+18.14%
|
|
SPY
|
$767.45
|
$765.72
|
-0.23%
|
|
QQQ
|
$717.51
|
$713.44
|
-0.57%
|
|
NVDA
|
$219.74
|
$214.72
|
-2.28%
|
Two of the crypto-linked names beat bitcoin outright and the third came close, while the two index trackers and the largest weight inside them went nowhere or fell. One convention note for anyone rebuilding this at home. Bitcoin's daily closes are 00:00 UTC snapshots against 16:00 ET equity settles, and CoinGecko's bitcoin series puts the same Friday close at $78,317.78 rather than $78,335.19. Both differences are worth a fraction of a percent and neither changes a conclusion on this page.
What mNAV Is and Why the Gap Is Pure Arithmetic
mNAV is the ratio between a treasury company's market capitalization and the market value of the crypto sitting on its balance sheet. At 1.0 the stock is worth exactly the coins. Above 1.0 the market is paying a premium for the wrapper, the management, and the ability to keep buying. Below 1.0 it is applying a discount.
Strategy's 8-K filed Monday, August 17 puts the holding at 840,447 BTC as of Sunday, August 16, acquired for an aggregate $63.36 billion at an average price of $75,385 per coin. No bitcoin was bought or sold in the week ending August 16, which means the coin count was fixed across the entire rally.
Run the numbers at both ends of the three sessions, using the 384.23 million shares outstanding that stockanalysis.com carries.
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Date
|
Bitcoin value of holdings
|
Market capitalization
|
Approximate mNAV
|
|
Friday, August 21
|
$65.84 billion
|
$45.82 billion
|
0.70
|
|
Tuesday, August 18
|
$54.36 billion
|
$35.55 billion
|
0.65
|
That is the whole story in one line. Bitcoin contributed a factor of 1.2111 and the discount narrowing from roughly 0.65 to 0.70 contributed another 1.0642, and 1.2111 multiplied by 1.0642 is 1.2889. MSTR gained 28.89%.
Both readings deserve a caveat before anyone builds a position on them. Strategy issues common stock continuously through its at-the-market program, so the August 18 share count was slightly lower, and some desks compute the ratio against enterprise value instead, which pushes the Friday reading closer to 0.76 once the roughly $4.3 billion gap between market cap and enterprise value is included. Our mNAV and treasury stocks explainer covers the competing conventions. The direction survives all of them, because the ratio expanded while bitcoin rose.
Why the Stock Moves More Than the Coins It Holds
Picture a house worth $660,000 with a $200,000 mortgage against it. Your equity is $460,000. If the house appreciates 10% to $726,000, the mortgage stays at $200,000 and your equity becomes $526,000, a gain of 14.3%. You did not borrow more and you did not buy another house. The debt simply refused to move.
Strategy runs exactly that structure at a scale of tens of billions of dollars. Above the common stock sit convertible notes and four separate preferred series listed on Nasdaq, and every one of those claims is fixed in dollars while the bitcoin underneath floats. Common shareholders own what is left after them, and what is left always moves by a larger percentage than the coin pile it is measured against.
The thinness of that residual is what made this particular rally so violent on the way up. Strategy's average purchase price is $75,385 per coin, and bitcoin's Friday close of $78,335.19 sits only 3.91% above it. The entire 840,447 BTC position carried about $2.48 billion of unrealized gain against $63.36 billion of cost. When a company's cost basis is that close to spot, every percentage point bitcoin travels lands on a very small cushion, and the equity reprices hard in both directions. Michael Saylor's buying record explains how the basis got dragged up there.
Anyone who wants the coin move without that residual math has the plain alternative in a spot bitcoin fund, which tracks bitcoin roughly one-for-one and carries none of the capital stack.
The Session Where the Pattern Broke
Amplification is not a constant, and this run proved it inside three days.
|
Session
|
BTC
|
MSTR
|
MSTR multiple
|
|
Wednesday, August 19
|
+7.09%
|
+12.68%
|
1.79x
|
|
Thursday, August 20
|
+5.44%
|
+7.81%
|
1.44x
|
|
Friday, August 21
|
+7.26%
|
+6.10%
|
0.84x
|
Friday was bitcoin's strongest session of the three, and it was the session MSTR lagged. The mNAV repricing happened early, on Wednesday, when the discount narrowed sharply as short positioning got run over. By Friday most of that repricing was already spent, which left the stock tracking the coin at less than one-for-one.
This is where the "MSTR is leveraged bitcoin" shorthand fails traders. The multiple is a residual output of two moving parts, and the discount can compress against you on exactly the day the asset delivers. HOOD showed the mirror image of the same unreliability, closing Thursday, August 20 down 0.70% while bitcoin gained 5.44%, then adding 13.70% on Friday, August 21 alone. Sizing a position off an assumed beta is how traders end up right on bitcoin and wrong on the stock.
One practical warning for anyone rebuilding these percentages from a weekend screen. Perpetual futures on tokenized equities keep marking through Saturday and Sunday while the underlying exchange is shut, so a weekend mark is not a settle. The MSTR and HOOD marks visible on Saturday, August 22 both sat away from Friday's closing prints.
The Same Mechanism on the Way Down
Leverage is symmetric, and Strategy's own twelve months are the cleanest demonstration available.
From the Friday, August 22, 2025 close of $358.13 to the Friday, August 21, 2026 close of $119.25, MSTR fell 66.70%. Bitcoin over the identical dates went from $116,874.09 to $78,335.19, a decline of 32.97%. The stock delivered 2.02 times the drawdown of the asset it holds. Measured instead from the October 6, 2025 peak, where the two happened to top out on the same day, Friday's closes put bitcoin 37.21% lower and MSTR 66.85% lower.
That is what a discount looks like when it opens rather than closes. The same $2.48 billion cushion that turns a 21% bitcoin rally into a 29% stock rally turns a 33% bitcoin decline into a 67% stock decline, because the fixed claims above the common do not shrink when bitcoin does.
The August 17 filing shows the second-order cost of trading below 1.0. In the week to August 16, Strategy sold 3,458,866 common shares for $333.7 million in net proceeds and bought no bitcoin with any of it, routing $52.4 million to dividends on one preferred series, $132.2 million to repurchasing that same series, and $149.1 million into a dollar reserve. With mNAV under 1.0, issuing stock to buy coins would cut bitcoin per share, so the accumulation engine idles and the share sales go to servicing the stack instead. We flagged that trap when the company first signalled it may sell bitcoin to fund preferred dividends. Across a long run of Strategy coverage the mechanism has never changed. What changed across these three sessions is only its sign.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does MSTR always move more than bitcoin?
No. On Friday, August 21, bitcoin closed up 7.26% and MSTR closed up 6.10%, so the stock trailed the coin on the strongest session of the rally. The long-run amplification is real, but it is an average across many sessions and never a guarantee on any single one.
What does an mNAV below 1.0 actually mean for shareholders?
It means the market values the company at less than the bitcoin on its balance sheet, which is the market pricing in the debt, the preferred dividends, and the tax and governance costs of holding coins inside a corporate wrapper. It also disables the accumulation flywheel, because selling shares below the coin value to buy more coins would leave every existing holder with less bitcoin per share.
How much bitcoin does one MSTR share represent?
Dividing 840,447 BTC by roughly 384 million shares gives about 0.00219 BTC per share, worth $171.35 at bitcoin's Friday, August 21 close. The stock closed that day at $119.25, which is the discount stated as a per-share number instead of a ratio.
Is buying a bitcoin treasury stock better than buying bitcoin?
It is a different trade with a different risk. You are taking a view on the discount as well as on the coin, and the discount is driven by financing conditions, dilution and dividend obligations that have nothing to do with bitcoin. Traders who only want the coin move should own the coin or a fund that tracks it, and the way institutional demand shows up in those funds is covered in our bitcoin ETF flows guide.
Bottom Line
The August 19 to August 21 run was not a story about a stock outperforming. It was a discount closing from roughly 0.65 to 0.70 stacked on a 21.11% move in the underlying, and those two components are separable enough to track independently. Two levels decide what follows. Bitcoin's $75,385 line is Strategy's average purchase price, and a close beneath it puts all 840,447 coins underwater again. The mNAV ratio is the other, because a move back above 1.0 restarts an accumulation program that has been idle while the company sells stock to pay preferred dividends rather than to buy coins. Strategy files its holdings update on Mondays, so the next dated reading of both lands Monday, August 24. Traders who size MSTR as a fixed multiple of bitcoin will keep getting caught by sessions like Friday, August 21, when the multiple came in below one.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.
