Strategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR), the world’s largest publicly traded Bitcoin holder, closed April at $165 per share, up 33 percent for the month in what TradingView data confirms was the company’s first positive monthly performance across nine consecutive calendar months dating back to a losing streak that began in August 2025 and compressed the stock by approximately 75 percent from peak to trough.

The recovery coincided with Bitcoin’s own best monthly performance since April 2025, with BTC gaining approximately 12 percent across April to trade near $78,000, lifting the paper value of Strategy’s 815,061 Bitcoin holdings above the company’s average acquisition cost of $75,528 per coin for the first time in several months and ending the protracted period of unrealised losses that had drawn criticism from short sellers and sceptical analysts throughout the first quarter of 2026.

Strategy simultaneously announced that the dividend rate on its perpetual preferred stock, Stretch (NASDAQ: STRC), will remain at 11.5 percent for May, unchanged from the prior two months and representing the third consecutive month at that rate following a series of increases since the instrument launched in July 2025 with a 9 percent dividend that the company has progressively raised to encourage trading around STRC’s $100 par value and reduce the price volatility that monthly dividend payment mechanics tend to introduce.

The decision to hold rather than raise the May dividend rate was explicitly tied to April’s volume-weighted average price of $99.76 for STRC, which the company described as close enough to its $100 par value to justify maintaining the current rate, with STRC trading at $99.75 as of the announcement and having remained slightly below par since April 15.

Strategy is separately proposing a structural change to STRC’s payment schedule that would shift dividends from monthly to semi-monthly, a change that requires shareholder approval at the June 8 annual meeting and that, if passed, would make STRC the only semi-monthly dividend-paying preferred stock in the market among 921 quarterly payers and 32 monthly payers. Michael Saylor framed the rationale directly: the proposed changes are “intended to stabilize price, dampen cyclicality, drive liquidity, and grow demand.”

The mechanics of the argument for semi-monthly payments are straightforward: more frequent distributions reduce the typical post-ex-dividend price drop that has been contributing to STRC’s persistent trading discount to par, spread buying activity more evenly throughout the month rather than concentrating it around a single payment date, and allow Strategy to purchase Bitcoin at a steadier pace rather than in the compressed windows that monthly payment timing creates.

STRC’s outstanding notional value has grown to $6.4 billion as of the company’s most recent filing, reflecting strong institutional and retail demand for an instrument that offers a high cash dividend yield alongside indirect exposure to Bitcoin’s long-term price appreciation thesis through the connection between STRC’s stability and the health of the underlying MSTR enterprise.

The 11.5 percent annual dividend obligation on $6.4 billion of outstanding STRC represents approximately $736 million in annual cash payments that Strategy must fund regardless of Bitcoin’s price direction, a fixed obligation that critics including Peter Schiff have characterised as structurally dependent on continued capital raising and Bitcoin appreciation rather than any independently sustainable operating cash flow.

MSTR’s first positive month in nine carries significant psychological weight for the company’s shareholders who have held through one of the steeper drawdowns in the stock’s history, and the confluence of April’s Bitcoin recovery, the STRC dividend stability, and the proposed semi-monthly payment reform gives Strategy a more constructive set of narratives heading into the May 5 Q1 earnings report than it has been able to present at any point since mid-2025.

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