Heres another gem the fanboys keeping throwing at me:
"Strategy doesnt need to sell its Bitcoin. They can just suspend off the dividend."
Okay. Let's actually walk through what that means.
Not for them. For you, the person holding the thing.
Quick plain English first.
STRC is a "preferred share." Think of it as a posh IOU that pays a monthly income, 11.5% right now.
"Suspend the dividend" just means the company stops paying you. And here's the first gut punch, straight out of their own legal docs: the board can stop paying for any reason it likes.
No excuse needed. It's not a default. Nobody broke any rules. They just stop.
"But hang on," people say, "STRC is cumulative. So even if they skip it, they still owe me. It builds up. I get it later."
True. The skipped money doesnt vanish. It stacks up, even grows on paper. Sounds safe enough.
Here's the catch nobody mentions. There is no due date. None. Nothing on earth forces them to ever actually pay that pile down. No maturity. No one can drag it forward. No court can demand it. It's an IOU with no deadline that you have zero power to enforce.
It's like a credit card you can keep spending on and never pay back.
So picture it: they suspend, the number you're owed climbs on a screen, months pass, years even, and you wait for cash that has no obligation to ever show up.
And they can shrink it. The fine print lets them grind the rate down over time. Drop the payout low enough, pay you that titchy amount, and the so called "protections" never even switch on.
Their own prospectus admits the safeguards "could be inadequate." Their words.
Now the part that should worry anyone further down the ladder.
There are weaker shares sitting below STRC.
STRK and STRD. Freeze STRC and those two freeze with it, automatically. STRK at least keeps its IOU. But STRD is "non-cumulative." Every payment it misses is gone.
Forever. No pile up, no catch up, no IOU. And STRD waves around one of the fattest yields in the whole range. Sold on that big number. A suspension quietly sets fire to it.
"But surely there are protections!"?
What protections?
The big one everyone points to stops the company paying its ordinary shareholders, or buying back ordinary stock, while you sit unpaid. Sounds like a proper handcuff.
Except they dont pay ordinary shareholders a dividend. Never have.
And they dont buy back stock, the whole game is selling stock to buy Bitcoin, not buying it back. So it handcuffs them from doing two things they were never going to do. Does nothing for you. Not a penny in your pocket.
And no, you cant vote your way out. The preferred barely gets a vote, and not on anything that matters.
Meanwhile one bloke, Saylor, swings about 38% of the company's votes off a 6% slice of actual ownership (super voting rights), through special shares he owns 99.9% of.
Even the ordinary owners cant easily overrule him. You? You're not even in the room.
So to the crowd saying "relax, they'll just suspend the dividend, no biggie," hear what they actually said.
The plan, when things get rough, is to switch off your income. Not theirs. Yours. And the further down you sit, the worse it is. The layer below you loses its income for good.
"They can just suspend the dividend" was never a safety net.
It IS the risk.
Let's say the quiet part out loud:
your "high yield savings account" can be switched off at will, owed to you forever on a screen, with no deadline, no way to force it, and no vote that counts.
Sleep tight.