Wall Street slashes Strategy targets as bitcoin treasury doctrine unravels
Maxim, Cantor and B. Riley cut MSTR price targets after Strategy sold bitcoin, testing its once-inviolable "never sell" pledge.
Three Wall Street brokerages have cut their price targets on Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) within days of one another, as analysts recalibrate their models for a bitcoin treasury company that has begun selling the asset it long vowed never to touch.
Maxim Group reduced its target from $250 to $215 while retaining a Buy rating, according to TokenPost. Even after the cut, the new figure implies upside of more than 120 per cent from Wednesday’s closing price of $98.37, when the shares rose 0.74 per cent. Cantor Fitzgerald has gone further, lowering its target to $186 after trimming its own bitcoin price forecast for August 2027 from $111,000 to $98,000. B. Riley cut its target from $215 to $155, cited Strategy’s decision to pause further bitcoin purchases, and slashed its bitcoin price estimate from $81,500 to $65,000.
A doctrine under pressure
The revisions follow Strategy’s disclosure that it had sold 1,638 BTC, worth roughly $105 million, cutting its total holdings to 842,138 BTC. The sale marks a departure from the company’s long-standing “never sell” stance, a pledge that has underpinned its equity premium over the value of its bitcoin holdings since it began accumulating the asset under founder Michael Saylor.
For analysts, the retreat changes the calculus. Strategy’s share price has traded at a premium to its net asset value largely because investors treated the company’s bitcoin stack as a one-way accumulation vehicle, insulated from forced or discretionary selling. Once that assumption is in question, the premium becomes harder to justify, and price targets built on it require revision — even where, as with Maxim, the underlying rating remains bullish.
On-chain activity adds to the scrutiny
Blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain reported that a wallet linked to Strategy moved more than 1,030 BTC, worth over $66 million, in the days following the disclosed sale. Arkham Intelligence data showed five separate transactions ranging from roughly $6 million to $21 million, following an earlier transfer of 300 BTC in the same week.
Strategy has not confirmed whether these transfers represent further sales or routine internal reallocation of its holdings between wallets. That ambiguity has itself become a point of tension for a company whose credibility with institutional holders rests on transparency around its treasury operations, and it explains why analysts are treating each wallet movement as a signal worth pricing in.
Why this matters beyond one stock
Strategy remains the largest corporate holder of bitcoin and a template many other listed companies have sought to replicate. A visible shift away from its accumulate-only strategy, paired with three separate downward revisions from Wall Street coverage, is likely to sharpen scrutiny of other corporate bitcoin treasuries that have adopted similar messaging without Strategy’s scale or balance-sheet flexibility.
For UK and European investors who track MSTR as a proxy for institutional bitcoin exposure, the episode is a reminder that treasury-company premiums are contingent on management commitments that can, and evidently do, change under market pressure.
Read more: Bitcoin’s rebound to $64,000 lays bare its dependence on Wall Street records
