MSCI has removed Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, from its indexes in its November review, in a decision that will force index-tracking funds to sell the stock and that casts a shadow over the whole bitcoin treasury industry.
The November 2026 Index Review, published shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, 11 November, removes Strategy from the MSCI USA Index, and with it from the broader MSCI World and ACWI indexes. The change takes effect at the close of trading on 30 November, and will be implemented on 1 December.
The reason is a new “non-operating company” screen that MSCI adopted on 15 October. Under the rule, a company fails if its operating assets make up less than 50 per cent of its total assets. Strategy’s balance sheet is dominated by bitcoin, so it fails the test.
Strategy held 850,364 bitcoin as of 8 November, bought at an average price of $75,456 a coin, for an aggregate cost of about $64.16 billion. That is roughly 4.05 per cent of all the bitcoin that will ever exist, and it dwarfs the company’s software business, which was its original activity before it began buying bitcoin in 2020.
Strategy was the only large-cap deletion in the review, and it accounted for more than 90 per cent of the combined float-adjusted market value of the six deletions, at about $37.26 billion of $40 billion. The others removed under the same screen were Japan’s Metaplanet, from the MSCI Japan Small Cap Index, Yellow Cake from the UK Small Cap Index, Iceland’s Skel and the micro-cap Upexi. A further 19 names are on a watchlist for the next review.
JPMorgan estimated last November that exclusion from MSCI’s indexes could drive about $2.8 billion of outflows from index-tracking funds, which must sell their Strategy shares by the 30 November close. Some estimates put the figure higher if other index providers follow MSCI’s lead. Strategy says funds tracking the indexes hold about 13 million of its shares, or around 3.1 per cent of the shares in issue.
Strategy’s shares closed on Wednesday at $122.35, up 1.06 per cent, and then slipped about 1.5 per cent in after-hours trading to around $120. The company said the removal does not delist the stock and does not force it to sell any bitcoin.
The MSCI USA Index had 24 deletions in total in the review, with the drugmaker Moderna the sole addition. The scale of Strategy’s removal, though, dominated the announcement, because no other deleted company came close to its size.
For the bitcoin treasury industry, the decision is a warning. Dozens of companies have copied Strategy’s model of raising money to buy bitcoin, and MSCI’s screen now treats them as investment vehicles rather than operating companies. Whether other index providers, such as S&P and FTSE Russell, follow will determine how much of the sector is pushed out of mainstream benchmarks.
Figures in this post were checked at 07:09 PKT on Thursday 12 November 2026.
This post is market news information only, not financial advice.
