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News · Nov 14, 2026 · 4 min read

MSCI drops Strategy on 30 November: index funds sell its shares, not its 850,364 bitcoin

Funds that copy MSCI’s indexes have until the close of 30 November to sell about 13 million Strategy shares. The rule behind it never mentions bitcoin and forces nobody to sell one. The bitcoin that has actually been sold this month came from somewhere else.

Firsthand card: "MSCI drops Strategy on 30 November: index funds sell its shares, not its 850,364 bitcoin", with the figure 850,364, the bitcoin Strategy held on 8 November 2026

MSCI deletes Strategy from its indexes at the close of 30 November

MSCI builds the share indexes that many of the world’s index funds copy. On 11 November it published its November review, and the list of deletions from the MSCI USA Index includes Strategy, the largest listed holder of bitcoin. The change takes effect at the close of business on 30 November. Leaving the USA index also takes Strategy out of the MSCI World and ACWI indexes, Bitcoin Magazine reported.

The reason is a rule MSCI adopted on 15 October, and it never mentions bitcoin. It bars what MSCI calls non-operating companies: a company without substantial operating assets is tested on five financial ratios, and is out if it is flagged on four or more. The same review removes Metaplanet from MSCI’s Japan small-cap index and Yellow Cake from the UK one, and Bitcoin Magazine names two more, Skel in Iceland and Upexi in the US. We covered the first day in our 12 November recap.

Index funds have to sell about 13 million Strategy shares

A fund that tracks an index holds what the index holds. When a share is deleted, the fund sells it, whatever its manager thinks of the company. That is all the forced selling there is: shares of one company, sold by the end of the month.

Strategy told MSCI during the consultation that funds tracking these indexes hold about 13 million of its shares, 3.1% of the total, CoinDesk reported. At the share price of 11 November that was roughly $1.6 billion. BloFin Research, quoted in the same report, put it at less than one day of normal trading in the stock.

The larger number going around, $2.8 billion, is a JPMorgan estimate from November 2025. It was made for an earlier MSCI proposal aimed at companies holding digital assets, not for the rule adopted. MSCI has published no figure of its own.

The rule does not make anyone sell a bitcoin

Strategy held 850,364 bitcoin on 8 November, according to the filing it made with the SEC the next day. That is 4.2% of the 20.1 million bitcoin in existence on our supply chart. None of it belongs to the index funds. A deletion does not delist the shares, and nothing in the rule obliges the company to sell anything.

The company has said as much. In a letter to MSCI on 31 August, signed by Michael Saylor and chief executive Phong Le, it wrote that the proposal “would have no meaningful impact on Strategy’s business”, The Block reported. Its filing for the week to 8 November shows it bought 1,036 bitcoin and sold none.

Index funds own Strategy’s shares. They never owned its bitcoin.

Where it can reach bitcoin is Strategy’s own buying

Strategy pays for its bitcoin with money raised from investors, lately by selling new shares. In the week to 8 November it sold 2.05 million shares for $283.8 million and spent $81.9 million of that on its 1,036 bitcoin, the same filing shows. Our data puts everything the network mined that week at about 2,905 BTC. One company bought more than a third of it.

That works best when the shares are worth more than the bitcoin behind them. The premium was 3.4 times in November 2024 and is about 1.08 times now, by CoinDesk’s count. Forced selling of the shares presses on that premium, and with a thinner premium each new share buys less bitcoin.

Markus Thielen of 10x Research told CoinDesk: “This outcome has been widely expected, so most of it is already priced in.” Either way the link to bitcoin is indirect. The rule sells none. It can make one large buyer smaller.

The bitcoin sold this month came out of the ETFs

Bitcoin has been sold in size this fortnight, by a different set of funds. Our ETF holdings chart shows the US spot funds held 1,297,980 BTC on 28 October and 1,276,770 on 12 November, 21,210 fewer. Over those fifteen days the network mined about 6,290.

In dollars, our flows chart shows money leaving on nine of the ten trading days from 30 October to 12 November, $2.57 billion in all. That is more than the $1.6 billion of Strategy shares the index funds must sell, and every dollar of it was bitcoin. The price closed at $73,722 on 11 November, the day of MSCI’s list, and at $71,366 on 13 November.

The ETFs let go of 21,210 bitcoin in fifteen days. The network mined about 6,290.

Chart: Bitcoin held by the US spot ETFs since September. The step down from 28 October is about 21,000 BTC, sold while Strategy’s 850,364 did not move. Open the chart

What it means for a miner

An index decides which shares a fund must hold. It has no say in what a block pays. A machine earns the same bitcoin whether Strategy is in the MSCI World index or not.

What changed a miner’s income this week is the network. Difficulty fell 9.1% on 14 November, so the same hashrate now earns about 10% more bitcoin than it did the day before. Our hashprice in bitcoin chart tracks that figure.

At the hashprice from before that cut, the most efficient machine in stock, the Antminer S23 XP Hyd at 8.9 J/TH, makes one bitcoin for about $19,500 of electricity at our Nigeria site, at 3.9 cents a kilowatt-hour. Buying one cost about $67,100 on 14 November. That is the best case, electricity only, and the cut lowers it further.

Strategy gets its bitcoin by selling shares at a premium. A miner gets them by running a machine on cheap power and keeping what it mines. Output is not guaranteed, and the BTC are worth whatever bitcoin is on the day you choose to sell them.

An index decides which shares a fund must hold. It has no say in what a block pays.

Chart: What one petahash earns in bitcoin each day. It steps up when difficulty falls, whatever any index does. Open the chart

Sources and further reading

Disclosure

Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.