James Anderson | FIRE Acceleration

Our capital markets decisions are driven by what we believe will maximize our *long-run* total returns. We have been consistent that we believe the most powerful and sustainable engine to power total returns in excess of Bitcoin is our amplification ratio. We've built a leading amplification ratio today at over 60%, but maximizing our amplification ratio over the long-run requires continuing to support our Digital Credit products. Demonstrating continued access to capital markets during drawdowns and slower periods has been provably helpful in building a track record of success for the credit strength embedded in those instruments. I expect the importance of this track record, specifically how Strive executed during this bear market, to increase in the coming years. I respectfully disagree that a "honeymoon" period is over for Strive as I believe we've only now built an amplification engine that has a durable moat along with no PIPE warrants remaining. I don't think most investors even understand the value of our amplification engine yet, which makes sense as amplification is designed to generate returns when Bitcoin moves up, and its been largely flat this year. When Bitcoin slows down, our base case is patience, and we've demonstrated that several times during this past year, but we've also demonstrated we're always ready to take bold actions on a moments notice. Less macro than the above, but we think $SATA has continued to trade very strong with strong demand. Even with the significant spike in $SATA short interest reported on 10/15, which was shortly after the announcement of $SATS, $SATA remains not much below $99, without a single dollar of buybacks. There are index rebalances coming up which should put in some decent size orders for $SATA. We've generally leaned towards increasing the interest rate over buybacks, but have also demonstrated multiple times that patience (doing nothing) can do the trick as well, as these are very attractive products. Lastly, there is an interesting, but large divergence in the viewpoint among many retail investors vs institutional shareholders in terms of common equity ATM usage. The institutions overwhelmingly want more common equity ATM usage with any premium, many retail investors want less or none. Our view has consistenly been in the middle, and I believe taking the extreme on either side would raise our overall cost of capital. We recently explained this to several of our large institutional shareholders asking for more common equity ATM usage during the $SATS IPO, and I want to offer the same to the retail investors asking for the opposite. During the last bull market, the vast majority of excess returns for MSTR over Bitcoin were driven by accretive common equity issuance. We've been consistent in our belief that it wasn't a sustainable model because there was no amplification engine, but also believe it was the rational decision at the time, as a high mNAV without amplification wouldn't have been sustainable either. The ideal scenario has always been having an amplification engine that has scarcity and sustainable growth while also being able to issue common equity accretively. Importantly, accretive common equity issuance isn't a requirement, as the amplification drives the majority of returns, unlike the last bull market, but it's a potential return amplifier. What this means in practice is likely less relative common equity ATM issuance than what investors saw MSTR do during the last bull market. That said, it will probably be more common equity issuance than some retail investors would want, and less than many institutional investors want, driven by what we believe will maximize total returns based on all of the data and information we have access to.