MicroStrategy stock rises 24% — tops $1,300 for first time in 24 years as bitcoin soars

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Shares of MicroStrategy Inc. soared toward a 24-year high on Monday, fueled by the recent rapid run up in bitcoin prices to near-record levels. A business-analytics software company at heart, investors have treated MicroStrategy’s stock MSTR, +23.59% as more of a digital-asset play, given that it has for years been building its bitcoin BTCUSD, -0.17% pile as its primary treasury asset. The stock shot up 24% in afternoon trading, to put it on track for the highest close since March 2000. It has rocketed 92% amid a six-day winning streak. That’s the longest winning streak since the 10-day stretch of gains that ended on Nov. 10, 2023, and the biggest six-day gain since it rose 100.6% over the six sessions ended Feb. 9, 2021, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The company’s market capitalization has swelled by $10.7 billion over the past six sessions to reach $22.4 billion on Monday. Last week, Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer became the biggest bull on MicroStrategy’s stock, after he initiated coverage on Feb. 27 with a buy rating and a $990 price target. The stock was already trading about 33% above that target. Palmer said his Wall Street-high target was based on his assumption that bitcoin will reach $125,000 at the end of 2025. Bitcoin was recently trading up 6.9% at $67,334 according to FactSet, just below its record of $68,990 reached a little more than two years ago. Bitcoin’s big rally — it has soared 60.4% year to date — comes after regulators approved several spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, and ahead of the next “halving” that is expected to occur in April. In MicroStrategy’s latest update on its bitcoin holdings, the company said that it paid $155.4 million to acquire 3,000 bitcoins over the 10-day period ending Feb. 25, for an average price of $51,813 per bitcoin. At current bitcoin prices, the value of those acquired has already increased by roughly $46.6 million. The company said as of Feb. 25, it held a total of approximately 193,000 bitcoins, which were acquired for about $6.09 billion at an average price of $31,544 per bitcoin. At current prices, the holdings would be valued at about $13 billion. In MicroStrategy’s post-earnings call with analysts in early February, co-founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor said he believed 2024 is the “year of birth” of bitcoin as an institutional-grade asset class. “And so we’ve now completed the first 15 years of the bitcoin lifecycle. And in that first 15 years, it was largely [an] unregulated retail asset, misunderstood,” Saylor said, according to a FactSet transcript. “The next 15 years, I would expect, will be a regulated institutional, high-growth period of bitcoin.” Over the past year, the correlation coefficient between MicroStrategy’s stock and bitcoin has been 0.95, according to a MarketWatch calculation of FactSet data. A reading of 1.00 would mean they move perfectly in tandem. Meanwhile, the correlation between MicroStrategy’s stock and the SPDR S&P Software & Services ETF XSW, of which the stock is a component, has been 0.80.