$MSTR Initial Preferred Stock Thoughts

Trigger Warning: Long Post.

Alright, lots of questions and info flying around out there so we might as well dig in a bit on the structure of the offering even if we don't have the final version yet.

There is a lot of optionality that comes with this offering, and I think with time people are really going to appreciate the power of having the Preferred class of stock for MSTR.

The Basics

The initial offering is for $250M and will be comprised of 2.5M Preferred shares under the ticker $STRK. This is most likely to feel out the initial market demand for this offering, and I will not be surprised if the offering is larger once the initial interest has been registered. The initial offering price (liquidation value) is set at $100 for this offering, and the offering is available to retain investors as well as institutions, funds, etc.

Each Preferred Share of stock is convertible into 1/10th of a share of Class A Common stock. This effectively creates a "strike price" on the offering at $1,000.

Dividends

The dividend on the Preferred Stock is 8% of the liquidation value. For simplicity you can think of this like the "par" value on a bond, and the dividend is locked against that value and not floating.

What this means in practice is that because the offering is price $100, the dividend is set at $8 annually. The dividend in practice will be paid on a quarterly basis at $2 per share.

This differs from what people typically look at as yield, so it is important to understand that distinction. Because the dividend is fixed at the offering price, if STRK trades at $200 then the "yield" will effectively be cut to 4% (but the dividend is still $8 per share).

The dividends have some optionality through both a toggle and a payment in kind mechanism. This basically means that MSTR can pay the dividend in either cash, Class A common stock, or a combination of both. In practice, the dividend will likely be paid in cash which will allow MSTR flexibility in how they deploy the ATM for any funding needed, but the optionality is there for either form of payment.

MSTR does retain discretion on whether dividends are paid, but in the event they are scheduled but not paid those dividends to accumulate and are still owed to the holders at a future date. There is a compounding effect built in here (i.e. additional dividends would be owed on the unpaid dividends), but we don't need to go that granular for now.

How will the Dividends get paid?

The dividends will get paid through either the cash flow of MSTR, the sale of common stock using the ATM, or other financing methods. More on this later.

Maturity Date

There is no maturity date, these are truly perpetual.

MSTR Early Conversion Call Provisions

There are also no early conversion provisions for MSTR (nothing like the 130% we have become accustomed to with the converts). Essentially, these are truly perpetual at the discretion of the Preferred Stock holders. There are some clean up clauses in the offering which would allow MSTR to call conversion on the remaining stock if they get down to $62.5M (25% of initial offering value) outstanding, but that's really it. The only other potential trigger is major changes in tax laws impacting the treatment of Preferred Stock, so this truly is at the discretion of the holders.

Premium

This offering is effectively collecting capital at a common stock price of $1,000 per share. As of the time I am writing this, the MSTR common stock share price is $337.40, so this means that MSTR is collecting capital at a premium of 196.4%.

For those wondering how I arrived at this, it's really quite simple. You simply take the total offering value of $250,000,000, and then you figure out how many shares of common stock the offering is convertible into. Since there are 2.5M preferred shares, and those shares are convertible into 1/10th of a share of Class A common stock, that means this offering has 250,000 shares of common stock associated with it once converted.

So from there we simply divide the offering by the common shares associated with it, and we arrive at $1,000 per share at the capital raising price.

Now the first thing you should notice about this is that it is MASSIVELY accretive to the Bitcoin per share metric. Far beyond even the best converts we have seen which had a 55% premium associated with them. But as I'm sure you can imagine, it isn't going to be quite as clean as using the 196.4% at face value. After all, there are dividends to pay here.

But what is important even with the dividends, is that they will now have the ability to either utilize cash flow for the $20M in annual dividends on this initial offering, or they have the ability to sell common stock at future values to fund the dividend payments.

For scale, raising $20M with the Class A Common Stock ATM essentially equates to MSTR turning on the ATM for 2 minutes. You'd never even notice.

So what is exciting about this?

Well for starters, the premium is initially huge. Even if common stock is used over a long period of time to fund the dividends, this has the potential to be massively more accretive than any convertible offering has been and definitely more accretive than the Class A ATM.

Now some of you likely picked up that they can actually issue these preferred shares in the future via an ATM offering. What you may not have considered is the long term ramifications here while you were sifting through all the yelling about "more ATMs!", or "this is just introducing even more ways to dilute!", or whatever the talking points were filling your feed.

But let's think about this logically for a minute. Once this offering is completed, MSTR could come back to the market with an S-3 filing and open up an ATM allowing them to issue more Preferred shares on this same structure. However, as with all ATM, they would be able to sell those shares at whatever the market price currently was.

So if the Preferred is trading at $115 per share, MSTR would collect $115 for every share they sell into the market now. This doesn't change the dynamics of the dividend, that share that they sell still only gets the 8% on the $100 liquidation value, so $8 annually.

But that's not even the exciting part really (and it will take a bit of time before they can likely use an ATM here due to some volume requirements needing to be met).

The exciting part is they just opened a potential off ramp from using the Class A common stock ATM for constant Bitcoin accumulation.

But now let's say they used the preferred offering. If they are issuing with an ATM, they will be selling those preferred shares at $115. So that means we need to divide that $2B by $115 to figure out how many shares of preferred we sold. I'll skip all the numbers, and just tell you it is 17,391,304 shares of preferred stock.

Let's just for fun say the Common stock is trading at $450 and the Preferred is trading at $115.

If they use the Common stock ATM, they will sell $2B worth of shares meaning they sold 4,444,444 shares of common stock to acquire that $2B in Bitcoin.

But that doesn't translate to how many common shares they essentially give up. As we know, preferred is convertible to common at 1/10 per share. So if we divide that total by 10 it means that we have "effectively" issued 1,739,130 common shares to raise the $2B.

That is 2,705,314 LESS CLASS A SHARES initially to raise the same $2B.

Now I know what you are thinking, they still have to pay the dividend. You are correct.

So what is the dividend on that $2B? Well, as we know it will always be $8 per share per year. So since we sold 17,391,304 shares the annual dividend would be $139,130,432.

So in this example, if the share price was $450 and never moved into the future, that would mean they would have more than 8 years before the same number of common shares would be issued from this offering as using the Common stock ATM.

If I assume that MSTR performs at 5% growth a year, this number of years extends out to 11 years.

At 10% it extends to 16 years.

If I assume MSTR performs at 15% growth a year, then I have no idea how far out it goes. I calculated it out to 62 years and it wasn't even close to breakeven yet and I'd be 100 years old so I figured that was far enough for me.

Now that is using linear math, so you can quickly see what happens here if performance early on gets anywhere close to even matching the expectations for Bitcoin over the next 5 years.

There is other flexibility as well. If conditions change they could always utilize convertibles to lock in funding for the dividend payments if so desired and if the premiums are attractive. And given the time frames and current improving political/regulatory changes we are seeing you could see an entire business transformation take place resulting in significantly increased cash flow making all this quite simple. I know people commonly view businesses as static and don't look at future optionality, but I am not one of those people.

These are just examples, but this treasury team is a creative bunch so don't rule out getting surprised over and over again by the structures they come up with.

MSTR is effectively creating 2 complimentary ATM products. One is used for the collection of capital at massively accretive values today, while the other is used to allow flexibility in funding the carrying costs of that capital.

So while there will always be a ton of people bearish on new developments and focusing on ways to make each change in strategy into a doomsday scenario, I find this to be an incredibly beneficial development that creates a ton of future flexibility to operate and execute the strategy.

If the demand is strong, and the market dynamics play out even remotely close to what I think could happen I could see a scenario where these start taking some of the convertible bond space for Fixed Income accumulation due to the lack of any point in time maturity risk.

So I think there is a lot to like here. I will be looking for the final structure/terms to be released and to see what the overall demand is on this first offering, but I'm not expecting any massive changes to the general terms of the offering with the potential exception of the amount raised.

We'll continue digging into the terms, and I'm sure people will start asking what would incentivize these buyers to convert into common, and we'll talk more about that once the offering is finalized. But this is an intriguing development which will give us lots to talk about and model out in the upcoming weeks and months.

As I always say, we may be a lot of things in this community, but bored is not one of them.

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Interesting read...but NGL the buying sounds a bit complicated..whats the benefit of going though all that? I use the payout to onchain option to receive right to my cold storage, easy-peasy worth the extra 1-1.5% fee.

I've been contemplating a potential purchase. So far, how would you rate your experience with the Start9?

Building my own seed signer this Sunday with $50 of parts. So easy a caveman can do it 🙋‍♂️ #bitcoin #btc #RaspberryPi nostr:npub17tyke9lkgxd98ruyeul6wt3pj3s9uxzgp9hxu5tsenjmweue6sqq4y3mgl

Still learning about this. Is the seed signer bitcoin only, or do you have to be a maxi to use it?

An alternative to on-chain #coinjoins for #Bitcoin privacy - Peg-out to Liquid Network - take advantage of confidential transactions - then Peg-in back to on-chain in a quick and low cost way. A LIQUID WHIRLPOOL. Any drawbacks to this method? I did a test and appears impossible for 3rd party to follow the flow between network hops. only cost an onchain fee and 0.25% peg-in/out fee and you could set whatever denomoniation you desire. #BTC #LBTC #LiquidNetwork #Blockstream #whirlpool

thanks man. tried to zap ya. having issues.

Been dabling in tutorials. your favorire?

Cool. gl i tried same but channel management was too time consuming?

This feels like Twitter but cooler, time to talk about #crypto & #bitcoin ☃️

personally i use joinmarket + jam

you can provide your coins for mixing and takers pay your fees for mixing. you can even earn a small amount if desired.

also allows for a neat withdraw method where you enter 3 addresses and it'll empty your jam balance spread out over time with random amounts while also mixing on the way out.

available on umbrel and start9 i'm pretty sure

if you're a tinkerer, guides are on raspibolt.org