MSCI’s New Index Screen Puts Strategy’s Fate in Its Own Filings

MSCI will make “non-operating companies” ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes starting with its November 2026 review, effective as of the close on Nov. 30, according to the index provider’s announcement. The rule could push Michael Saylor’s Strategy, a software company turned bitcoin holder, out of indexes that funds track automatically.

The announcement does not name Strategy or any other company. The new category sits alongside investment funds, business development companies and other passive vehicles, which MSCI already excludes.

The clock is in the filings

A current index member is removed only if it fails MSCI’s screen in each of its two most recent annual filing periods, the announcement says. MSCI may also use a company’s latest interim filing.

That buffer means the decision runs on accounting periods a company has already reported. For a business whose balance sheet is mostly bitcoin, the ratios are whatever its own annual reports say they are.

The freeze is gone

In October 2025, MSCI imposed interim measures on companies whose digital asset holdings made up 50% or more of their total assets. It froze increases in their share counts and inclusion factors, the figures that set how much of a company an index holds, and deferred their additions.

MSCI is discontinuing those measures with the November review. Those companies will now be judged under the same non-operating test as everyone else.

The freeze mattered because of how Strategy funds its purchases. Fundstrat’s Sean Farrell noted in a client note that Strategy “issued more than $2 billion of common stock in August,” Yahoo Finance reports.

Under the freeze, new shares like those did not raise Strategy’s weight in MSCI’s indexes. If Strategy stays eligible after November, that cap no longer applies, by my reading of the announcement. If it fails the test, the question of weight goes away along with the listing.

Who sells, and how much

Index-tracking funds would be expected to sell if a company is removed, Yahoo Finance reports. Farrell estimates selling across MSCI-linked products at “around $2 billion” and wrote that “the market can absorb the associated flows.”

JPMorgan analysts put the figure higher in a note last November, before the rule was final, estimating that exclusion could trigger about $2.8 billion of outflows from Strategy’s stock, CoinDesk reports. If funds do sell, CoinDesk notes, they would be selling the shares, which does not by itself mean Strategy would sell any bitcoin.

Farrell also argued that “the market has had months to prepare for this outcome.” Strategy holds about 4% of bitcoin’s total supply, according to Yahoo Finance. It is the best known of the digital asset treasury companies, public companies whose main asset is crypto, and the 2025 freeze applied to MSCI’s preliminary list of that whole group.

Farrell’s own comparison puts the estimated index selling in the same range as one month of Strategy’s stock sales. The buyers on the other side of any forced selling would be investors outside MSCI-linked funds, at a date everyone can see coming.

What happens next

MSCI says the list of current index members that could be affected is already posted on its index consultations page.