Strive reported $474.8 million of net income attributable to common stockholders for the third quarter ended Sept. 30, a print that arrived Friday alongside a company claim that Class A total return had outperformed bitcoin by 103.7% year to date through the same date.
GAAP net income was $509.0 million, or $5.24 a share on a fully diluted basis. Almost all of that came from a $533.7 million unrealized gain on digital assets marked to fair value. Operating revenue for the quarter was just $2.7 million, so the earnings line is a treasury mark, not a fee business.
In a post on X that led with the outperformance figure, Strive also highlighted a year-to-date bitcoin yield of 63.2% and a bitcoin dollar gain of $9.00 per assumed diluted share outstanding, both measured through Sept. 30. Chairman and CEO Matthew Cole tied those metrics to the stock’s relative showing against the asset.
“Strive has continued to successfully execute on its treasury management strategy, delivering a strong bitcoin yield year to date in 2026, which I believe is the primary driver of our common equity’s outperformance relative to Bitcoin so far this year,” Cole said in the earnings release.
Bitcoin yield, buys and the preferred stack
Bitcoin yield, as Strive defines it, is the percentage change in bitcoin per share over a period — not a cash yield. On that measure the company posted 18.5% in the third quarter alone and 19.3% from Oct. 1 through Oct. 30, after the SATS preferred debut.
Strive acquired 8,136 bitcoin in the third quarter at an average cost of about $78,885 and 20,373 bitcoin over the nine months ended Sept. 30. Another 15,124 coins followed between Oct. 1 and Oct. 30. Holdings stood at 28,000 bitcoin on Sept. 30 and 43,124 by Oct. 30, keeping Strive among the largest public corporate stacks after recent multi-thousand-coin buys and smaller weekly adds that still trailed Strategy.
Digital assets at fair value were $2.34 billion on the Sept. 30 balance sheet. Cash had risen to $490.4 million by Oct. 30, and Strive still held Strategy’s variable-rate STRC preferred with a fair value of about $50.1 million.
The capital stack that funded the buys is mostly perpetual preferreds. On Oct. 20 Strive closed a registered offering of 7 million shares of its 15% Series A perpetual preferred (SATS) for about $609 million in net proceeds. Preferred dividends of $34.2 million in the quarter are what turned the $509.0 million GAAP profit into the $474.8 million common figure.
Strip the story to nine-month GAAP and the picture flips. For the nine months ended Sept. 30, Strive posted a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $88.4 million. The third-quarter profit is real under fair-value accounting, but it is concentrated in one mark-to-market line.
What ASST stock has done over the past year
ASST itself has not moved in a straight line with the company’s bitcoin-yield scoreboard. Shares closed at $20.59 on Thursday, down about 10% on the day, and traded near $20.70 early Friday. That leaves the stock roughly 29% below its level a year earlier, when Yahoo Finance data put the close near $29, and about 33% under its Oct. 21 local high of $30.75.
The 52-week range on Yahoo Finance runs from $7.02 to $34.40. Year to date, the price path from the Jan. 2 close near $17.30 into the mid-$20s is a gain of roughly 20%, with a February low near the 52-week floor and a September push back toward $30. Through Sept. 30 — the cutoff on Strive’s outperformance claim — ASST had risen about 70% from that January close while bitcoin was down roughly 7% over the same window on Yahoo Finance data, a wide gap even before the company’s own total-return methodology.
The longer chart still carries the scar of 2025, when Asset Entities became the public shell for Strive’s bitcoin-treasury reverse merger and the share price spiked into triple digits on weekly closes before collapsing. Investors who held through that conversion saw a different ride than the tidy year-to-date relative-return figure Strive put at the top of Friday’s note.
Cole said the recent SATS issuance leaves Strive “never been in a better position to generate long-term returns in excess of Bitcoin for our common equity shareholders.” The test for ASST from here is whether another quarter of bitcoin yield and preferred-funded buys can reopen the gap to bitcoin after a year in which the stock still sits well below where it traded twelve months ago, even as the treasury has climbed past 30,000 then 40,000 bitcoin.