MSCI may drop Strategy from its indexes, and MSTR fell 9.6% on the news

MSCI said on 15 October that non-operating companies are no longer eligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes. The preliminary list of deletions carries Strategy and Metaplanet. The final list comes on 11 November, and the change takes effect at the close of 30 November.

How the screen works

The test runs in two steps. A core screen asks whether the issuer holds substantial operating assets. An issuer that fails it goes to five financial ratios — operating asset intensity, expense intensity, cash flow, fair value intensity and capital dependence — and loses its place if it is flagged on four of the five. A company already in the index leaves only if it fails in both of its two most recent annual filings. A company trying to get in is blocked if it fails in either one.

Three names on the same preliminary list own no crypto at all. Yellow Cake holds uranium. Skel Fjarfestingafelag is an Icelandic investment company. Upexi sits there for its solana. MSCI index exclusion here follows the shape of a balance sheet, and a treasury of bitcoin trips the ratios for the same reason a vault of uranium does.

“Digital assets are assets. Index providers should measure markets, not decide which assets companies are allowed to own.”

— Strategy, Post on X, 14 August 2026

What the market did

Traders did not wait for the November list. Strategy closed Friday at $136.83 against $151.29 on Thursday, down 9.6%, on 31.8 million shares. Every other October session traded between 12 and 24 million, so the selling came in at roughly double the month's pace. Metaplanet went from 277 to 267 yen on Monday in Tokyo.

One number is doing a lot of work in the coverage: $2.8bn of forced selling. JPMorgan put that figure out in November 2025, when the stock traded far higher. The 13 million MSTR shares sitting in MSCI-linked funds are worth $1.78bn at Friday's close, about a billion less than the headline everyone is quoting.

Strategy reported 848,250 bitcoin on 11 October, bought for $64.00bn at an average of $75,444. At $82,835 that stack is worth $70.3bn, so the company sits about $6bn above its cost. Metaplanet is on the other side of its own average: 44,000 coins bought near $88,551.

The market has already made its own ruling. Strategy's 384.23 million shares are worth $52.57bn, a quarter below the market value of the coins, and the enterprise value of $56.9bn still leaves a gap. Debt and four series of preferred stock sit ahead of the common, which explains part of the discount, and the rest is the same discount that pushed us to count buybacks against purchases a week ago. Impairment accounting does the rest of the damage, as Capital B's half-year showed.

What settles next

Two things settle this. The 11 November list says who actually goes. Then the filing test decides whether Strategy leaves at all, because a sitting constituent has to fail in both of its last two annual filings, and the second of those is the one Strategy has yet to file.

Informational material, not investment advice. Prices and holdings were read on the morning of 19 October 2026, and MSCI publishes the binding list on 11 November.