Strategy made $19.53 billion in profit last quarter. Yet MSCI, one of the world’s biggest providers of stock indexes, has decided Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin company no longer belongs in some of its major investment benchmarks.
MSCI’s November review lists “STRATEGY A”—the company’s MSTR shares—for deletion from the MSCI USA Index after trading closes November 30. That also removes the stock from broader indexes that include U.S. companies, such as the MSCI World and MSCI All Country World indexes.
That sounds technical, but the distinction matters: MSCI is not removing Strategy from the Nasdaq stock exchange, shutting down its business, or making it sell Bitcoin. It is taking MSTR out of stock lists that investment funds use to decide which companies to own.
Consider an ETF designed to copy the MSCI USA Index. When MSTR disappears from the list, the fund generally has to sell its shares, regardless of whether the fund manager likes Saylor’s strategy.
This is why it’s bad news for Strategy. It means less indirect exposition to investments.
Why is MSCI kicking Strategy out?
MSCI adopted new rules in October for so-called non-operating companies. The idea is to keep investment vehicles—businesses that mainly hold financial assets—out of indexes meant to track operating companies. Its screening process considers a company’s operating assets and other financial measures.
MSCI’s deletion list does not spell out exactly which tests Strategy failed. The company, however, argues that raising capital, managing its Bitcoin treasury and issuing financial products amount to a genuine operating business.
In an August letter to MSCI, Strategy called the proposal “discriminatory, arbitrary, and misguided.” It argued that MSCI should be a “mirror of the market, not an arbiter of it.”
Strategy also maintains a software business, but Bitcoin now dominates its finances. The disagreement is whether its Bitcoin activity counts as running a company or mainly managing an investment portfolio.
Strategy’s latest quarterly earnings show $19.53 billion in net income. But that does not mean its software customers paid the company anything close to that amount.
Nearly all of its $20.91 billion in reported operating income came from a rise in the accounting value of its Bitcoin. Under rules adopted in 2025, changes in Bitcoin’s market price appear in Strategy’s earnings even when it has not sold the coins. A decline in Bitcoin can produce the opposite result.
Its software division, meanwhile, recorded $125.4 million in quarterly revenue, down 3% from a year earlier. Its $477.2 million in revenue for all of 2025 was slightly below the $486.3 million reported in 2019, before Strategy began buying Bitcoin.
