NEW YORK — Funds that mirror MSCI’s global stock benchmarks could be forced to sell Strategy, the Bitcoin-buying software company led by Michael Saylor, by the end of November. MSCI said late Thursday that it will make “non-operating companies” ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes, a screen its own August trial run said Strategy would fail.
MSCI will implement the proposal “with minor modifications” in its November index review, effective as of the close of November 30, according to the announcement, which carries an October 15 date. An issuer that fails an initial test for “substantial operating assets” becomes ineligible if it is flagged on four or more of five financial ratios. Current constituents come out only if they fail the screen “in each of the two most recent annual filing periods.”
The announcement names no company. The consultation MSCI ran in August did. Applied to May 2026 data, the screen would have deleted three issuers, Strategy, Yellow Cake and Metaplanet, and put three more on a watchlist. Strategy’s float-adjusted market value in that table was $23.9 billion. The other five combined came to about $3.6 billion, which makes Strategy roughly 87% of the total, a share its own letter to MSCI also cites.
Strategy has fought the screen. In an August 31 letter to MSCI’s Equity Index Committee it called the proposal “discriminatory, arbitrary, and misguided,” said it has about 1,500 employees and said it reports its Bitcoin business as an operating segment. Its software business generates “nearly half a billion dollars in annual revenue,” by the company’s own account. Fortune reported Monday that its Bitcoin holdings are worth roughly $70 billion, and that Strategy sold Bitcoin on four occasions during the price slump. Whether a firm with that balance sheet is a software company with a large Bitcoin position, or the reverse, is the question MSCI’s ratios answer.
MSCI also ends the stopgap it set on October 10, 2025: a freeze on share-count increases and a deferral of additions for companies whose digital asset holdings were 50% or more of total assets. “Going forward, eligibility for all such companies will be assessed under the methodology described above,” MSCI’s announcement says. The company-specific rule is gone; the general one replaces it.
The price of exclusion is a soft number. Cointelegraph reported that JPMorgan analysts estimated roughly $2.8 billion in selling if Strategy is dropped, but that figure concerned MSCI’s earlier digital-asset proposal, not the rules adopted Thursday, and the outlet did not say how it was built.
MSCI’s updated list of affected companies sits on a page TEH could not open. Cointelegraph’s account names Upexi among the deletions, while MSCI’s August table listed Yellow Cake and not Upexi. TEH also found no Strategy statement on the final rules.
