TD Cowen Keeps Strategy at $260 as Dilution Eats Bitcoin Upside

Strategy holders just got a reminder that a bigger Bitcoin pile does not automatically mean more Bitcoin per share.

TD Cowen raised its Bitcoin forecast but kept its $260 price target on Strategy (MSTR) unchanged. Dilution, the analysts said, eats into the upside.

The target nobody moved

Analysts Lance Vitanza and Jonnathan Navarrete kept their Buy rating and lifted the model to roughly $109,000 for Bitcoin by the end of 2026. The stock target stayed put at $260.

That gap is the story. A higher Bitcoin price should boost Strategy's earnings power. Instead, "capital structure expansion and associated dilution temper the per-share benefit," the analysts wrote.

MSTR fell about 2.5% to $150, leaving it down nearly 5% for the year. Even so, the $260 target implies roughly 73% upside from there.

Why the stack gets thinner per share

Strategy does not push every dollar it raises straight into Bitcoin. Some of it goes to cash reserves and to supporting its preferred shares — STRC, STRF and STRD.

Those holders sit ahead of common shareholders. Once debt and preferred claims are counted, Bitcoin ownership per MSTR share looks "less robust" than the raw coin count suggests.

The company holds 848,000 BTC, carrying around $4.5 billion in unrealized profit. Its valuation has climbed back to roughly one times net asset value, up from as low as 0.63 in June.

What the bulls are pricing in

TD Cowen's updated model sees Bitcoin near $109,000 by the end of 2026 and $280,000 by 2029. That runs well above QCP Capital's fourth-quarter base case of $80,000 to $90,000.

Bitcoin sat near $81,300 when the note was published, down 9% for the year at that point.

For anyone treating MSTR as a leveraged Bitcoin proxy, the takeaway is blunt: read the capital stack, not just the coin count. Saylor also pointed out that Strategy leads all companies in tokenized stock value on-chain, with about $491 million across its MSTR and STRC tokens.