Key Points

• Strategy bought 4,603 Bitcoin for $370 million in late August, ending a summer of sales.

• Large buyers use over-the-counter desks specifically to avoid moving the market.

• Strategy's influence now runs through headlines and sentiment, not through order flow.

• 10 stocks we like better than Bitcoin ›

Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) owns 4% of all the Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) in existence. Not 4% of the Bitcoin that trades on a given day; 4% of every coin that will ever exist. The company formerly known as MicroStrategy holds 845,050 of them. And in late August, after a summer of quietly selling, it started buying again. In three weeks, Strategy added 4,603 coins for a total price of $370 million. The average price was $80,318 per coin.

So a massive Bitcoin whale is getting back in the blockchain pool. Will these purchases raise the water level?

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The bucket and the reservoir

A holding that large should move the market. But Strategy never offered to sell hundreds of thousands of coins at once, and its largest Bitcoin buy ever only added 55,500 coins in one week. It was 0.28% of the supply available at the time, just before Thanksgiving 2024.

The smaller August splurge represented just 0.02% of Bitcoin's market cap.

But market cap counts coins nobody is selling, while price is set by the much smaller pool of coins changing hands that day. And Strategy's latest buy wasn't even huge relative to daily Bitcoin trades. According to data from CoinMarketCap, the cryptocurrency's daily trading volume hovered around $30 billion in the last month. Even if Strategy made a single bulk purchase, it would have accounted for roughly 1.2% of that day's Bitcoin volume.

These are rounding errors, not game-changing and market-moving price boosters. That's a Bitcoin buyer adding a bucket of water to a massive reservoir, using a skinny hose in the middle of the night, specifically so nobody notices.

That last part may sound silly, but it's quite real. Big buyers use over-the-counter desks instead of crypto brokerages precisely to avoid moving market prices with their large orders.

Strategy already ran this experiment, at 10 times the size

If the scale argument doesn't convince you, the track record should. Back in January, Strategy dropped $3.4 billion on 35,932 coins at prices around $91,519 and $95,284. Then Bitcoin fell off a cliff.

The next several holding reports show Strategy's average purchase price sliding from $87,974 to $67,710 in mid-February. Three and a half billion dollars of buying, and the market shrugged and kept going down. Anyone expecting $370 million to do the heavy lifting will be disappointed.

What Strategy's buying actually signals

For Bitcoin holders, the useful conclusion is that Strategy has become a price taker. Its purchases tend to fall near local highs, and its handful of recent sales clustered near the annual low.

The company reacts to the market it helped popularize; it does not steer prices with enormous trades.

Whatever influence Strategy still has runs through sentiment rather than order flow. When the largest corporate holder broke a six-year never-sell streak with 32 coins in June, the coins didn't matter; the headline did. The trade didn't make any meaningful change to Bitcoin's fundamental value.

But traders watch these weekly filings, and a reversal of that pattern gets market-moving attention that 4,603 coins never could on their own.

And the honest scoreboard for the quarter isn't hugely bullish, either. Strategy's net Bitcoin acquired in the third quarter is negative 950. The world's largest corporate Bitcoin holder started buying again, but it'll take a few more trades to make it a net buyer.

So the whale climbed back into the Bitcoin pool. Everyone watched, but the water level didn't really move.

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Anders Bylund has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.