Strive bought 15,124 bitcoin in October, lifting holdings to 43,124

Strive, Inc. bought 15,124 bitcoin in October, it said in a 6 November earnings report. That took its holdings to 43,124 BTC, among the four largest at any listed company. It paid for much of the buying with stock that costs 15% a year.

These numbers come from Strive's quarterly report and a run of weekly filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm trades on Nasdaq under the ticker ASST. Its chairman and chief executive, Matthew Cole, has made no secret of wanting Strive ranked among the biggest corporate bitcoin holders anywhere.

How much Strive bought, and when

In October, Strive added 15,124 bitcoin, more than half of everything it now holds. It bought in weekly batches and filed each one with the SEC. Between 5 and 9 October it picked up 3,311 BTC at about $84,500 each. The next documented week brought 4,045 more. Then 6,182 BTC between 17 and 23 October, at roughly $82,732. The final batch, 124 BTC bought between 24 and 30 October, averaged $80,526.

By the end of the month the total stood at 43,124 bitcoin. Strive had bought 8,136 in the third quarter and closed September with 28,000, so one month lifted the pile by more than half. Across the first ten months of 2026 it bought 35,497 bitcoin, Cointelegraph reported, citing the earnings report.

How Strive became a bitcoin company

Strive is not a mining firm and not a crypto startup. It is an asset manager that turned its own balance sheet into a bitcoin fund. Operating revenue is small, about $2.7 million in the quarter, drawn from investment advisory fees and a medical device business it picked up in January by taking over Semler Scientific, The Block reported. The bitcoin is the main event. Next to a 43,124-coin position, everything else is a rounding error.

That design is now common. A bitcoin treasury company raises money from investors, buys bitcoin, and asks the market to value its shares above the coins behind them. Strategy built the template and still dwarfs the field. Strive is running the same play at a smaller size, and faster.

A $509 million profit, almost all on paper

Strive reported GAAP net income of $509.0 million for the third quarter, or $5.24 a diluted share. The headline flatters the quarter. Almost none of that was cash. The profit came from unrealized gains on bitcoin the company already held, worth $533.7 million for the three months, according to The Block. Bitcoin sold higher then. The gain is marked against a price the market has since left behind.

Management prefers a different yardstick. It reported a bitcoin yield, its measure of how fast holdings grow for each share, of 18.5% for the quarter and 63.2% for the year so far. Cole called it execution. "Strive has continued to successfully execute on its treasury management strategy," he said in the release.

Where the money comes from

Most of the buying runs on money that looks borrowed but is not quite debt. On 20 October, Strive sold 7 million shares of a preferred stock it calls SATS, raising about $609.0 million after fees. Those shares pay a 15% annual dividend. The company has also set up a program to sell up to $1 billion more of them over time.

That funding has a sharp edge. A 15% dividend is a bill that arrives whether bitcoin rises or falls. Strive held $490.4 million in cash at the end of October, The Block reported, plus a slice of Strategy's preferred shares. It has not said how much of the $609 million it plans to turn into more bitcoin. Jeff Walton, the company's chief risk officer, framed the preferred shares as a way of "finding yield and distribution that is not correlated to Bitcoin or crypto."

Buying while the price fell

Every documented October purchase was made above where bitcoin trades now. The firm paid about $84,500 in early October and $80,526 in the final week. Bitcoin changed hands near $75,980 at about 15:10 UTC on 8 November, inside a 24-hour range of $75,540 to $76,105, according to CoinGecko. The arithmetic is plain. On its October buys, Strive is underwater.

The stock has felt it. ASST fell about 2% to $20.20 on 6 November and was down more than 31% over the previous 30 days, against a drop of roughly 12% for bitcoin itself, The Block reported. Companies that hold bitcoin tend to swing harder than the coin, up and down. This was the down one.

Strive is still climbing the league table. It ranks fourth among listed bitcoin holders, behind Strategy, Metaplanet and Twenty One Capital, on data from BitcoinTreasuries.NET cited by Cointelegraph. It sits 390 bitcoin behind Twenty One and fewer than 900 short of second place. Cole said in September that ending the year as the number two holder was not out of the question, though he added it was not his base case.

What to watch

The next weekly filing will show whether Strive kept buying through early November, when bitcoin was cheaper still. Watch the dividend math too. The more SATS shares the company sells, the larger the fixed payout it owes, and that obligation does not care what bitcoin does. The race for second place is close. A single week of heavy buying by Strive or Metaplanet could settle it. For now the gap is small and the market is not helping.