Crypto

Strategy Stopped Buying Bitcoin and Wall Street Cooled on MARA

By Omar aka Crypt0 · Sep 14, 2026

The two most famous Bitcoin proxies on Wall Street both changed course this week, in opposite directions, and the market barely blinked. J.P. Morgan double downgraded MARA Holdings, cutting its rating two levels from Overweight to Underweight. Analyst Richard Choe questioned the miner's execution of its pivot toward data centers, pointing to diluted value creation from its capital light joint venture with Starwood Capital Group. The two partnered in February to convert select Bitcoin mining sites into high performance enterprise and AI data centers. Choe argued some of MARA's existing sites carry smaller power capacities that make them less attractive for conversion, and that cheap land is getting harder to acquire as competition heats up. MARA fell 2.6 percent to 11.67 dollars on Monday, though the stock is still up 33 percent this year. Choe cut the price target to 11 dollars from 13.

Across town, Strategy made the opposite move and got the opposite market reaction. The company disclosed it bought zero Bitcoin in the preceding week, extending a dry spell that started at the end of August. As of September 13 it held 845,050 Bitcoin bought at an average price of 75,412 dollars, a narrow premium over Bitcoin's current price near 78,127 dollars. But instead of accumulating, Strategy repurchased 1,420,467 shares of its own stock for 139.3 million dollars in cash. It keeps a 5.1 billion dollar reserve plus 1.3 billion dollars in cash to service preferred dividends and debt. The buyback follows a new financial framework unveiled in late June, under which Strategy will opportunistically buy and sell its own shares, and sell Bitcoin when needed to pad the dollar reserve. Strategy stock rose 1.3 percent to 132.73 dollars on Monday.

Read the two stories together and they describe a maturing corporate Bitcoin strategy. The early era was simple: buy as much Bitcoin as possible, issue shares to buy more, repeat. The new era looks like actual treasury management, with reserves, buybacks, and optionality. MARA is trying to turn mining sites into AI data centers because the market now pays more for compute than for hashes. Strategy is treating its own equity as a tradeable asset alongside its Bitcoin. Both moves are more sophisticated than the strategies they replace, and the market rewarded the one it understood. Bitcoin itself gained more than 20 percent over the past month heading into Tuesday's Senate vote on the Clarity Act, which suggests the asset is doing fine while its equity proxies figure out who they want to be.

For investors, the takeaway is that Bitcoin exposure through stocks now comes with real corporate strategy attached, and that strategy deserves its own homework. The miners are becoming data center developers. The whales are becoming treasury managers. Buy the thesis you actually believe in, because the simple days of the proxy trade are behind us.

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