Where your return comes from
Your dollar return decomposes into three independent moves: the premium you give back (or keep), the coin-per-share the company adds through accretion, and the coin's own price move. The first two are the structural bet; the third is just the coin.
| Driver | Effect on your return |
|---|
Premium scenarios — break-even coin move & edge vs holding coin
Same entry and accretion, different exit premiums. The break-even column is how far the coin must rise for you not to lose money; the edge column is how you do versus simply holding the coin — and that one is independent of where the coin goes.
| Exit mNAV | Break-even coin move | Edge vs holding coin |
|---|
The premium is the whole trade
A digital-asset-treasury stock is a leveraged, premium-wrapped bet on a coin. The leverage is real — at 1.8x mNAV each dollar buys about 56 cents of coin, so the stock swings harder than the coin — but the premium is the part that quietly decides whether you win. If it holds and the company keeps accreting coin per share by issuing above NAV, you can beat the coin outright. If it compresses, you can watch the coin rip and still lose money, because the market repriced how many dollars it will pay for each dollar of treasury. The cruel case is a premium crush into a flat or falling coin: leverage and premium decay pull the same direction and the drawdown dwarfs the coin's. This calculator makes the premium assumption explicit instead of burying it inside a price target — decide what you think mNAV does, and the break-even and the edge fall out of it. For the company's own accretion math, see the issuer-side mNAV & accretion calculator; to compare against plain coin exposure, the ETF vs self-custody calculator.
The math, and why the coin's move cancels
Write your entry premium as mNAV₀, the exit premium you assume as mNAV₁, coin-per-share growth over the horizon as an accretion factor A = (1 + g)t, and the coin's own return as r. The stock's value tracks premium × coin-per-share × coin price, so your dollar return is (mNAV₁ ÷ mNAV₀) × A × (1 + r) − 1. Set that to zero for the dollar break-even and the required coin move is r* = mNAV₀ ÷ (mNAV₁ × A) − 1: buy at 1.8x, assume it fades to 1.0x with no accretion, and the coin must rise 80% for you to merely get your money back.
Now compare against just holding the coin, whose return is r. Your edge = (mNAV₁ ÷ mNAV₀) × A × (1 + r) ÷ (1 + r) − 1 = (mNAV₁ ÷ mNAV₀) × A − 1 — the (1 + r) terms cancel, so how you do relative to the coin does not depend on the coin at all. It depends only on whether accretion (A) outruns premium decay (mNAV₁ ÷ mNAV₀). That is the single most important and most counter-intuitive fact about owning a treasury stock instead of the coin: your relative outcome is locked in by the premium path and the accretion, and the coin's rally or crash only scales the absolute numbers. It also ignores dilution beyond what you fold into accretion, debt on the balance sheet, and any discount-to-NAV floor — a treasury stock can and has traded below 1.0x, which this lets you model as an exit mNAV under 1.