All four tickers move when Bitcoin moves. That surface similarity has led a lot of investors to treat $MSTR, $COIN, $MARA, and IBIT as variations on the same trade. They are not. The filings say so directly, and the divergence in how each company's economics actually connect to Bitcoin price is wide enough that the same analytical lens applied across all four will consistently produce the wrong read on at least three of them.
The clearest way to see this is to ask what question each filing is actually answering. For $MSTR, the question is how much Bitcoin the company holds and at what financing cost. For $COIN, the question is how much revenue the exchange generated and how that revenue is split between transaction fees and services. For $MARA, the question is how many exahashes the fleet is producing and what it costs per coin to mine. For IBIT, the question is whether NAV tracks spot Bitcoin and what the fee drag looks like. These are four different questions. They require four different reading strategies.
MSTR Is a Treasury Vehicle, Not a Software Company
Strategy disclosed aggregate fair market value of approximately $64.04 billion as of April 26, 2026, per the May 6 10-Q. At $78,258 per BTC on that snapshot date, the Bitcoin position dwarfs every other line item on the balance sheet by orders of magnitude. The operating software business still exists, but its cash flows are not the variable that moves the equity. What moves the equity is the size of the Bitcoin position relative to the share count, the cost of the capital used to acquire it, and the market's willingness to pay a premium or discount to the implied BTC-per-share.
The risk-factor tape confirms the focus. $MSTR's most recent annual filing showed 8 added and 8 removed risk-factor candidates compared to the prior year, with 2 materially changed items. The churn in risk language at $MSTR tracks the evolution of its financing and treasury strategy, not product or customer risk. An investor reading $MSTR's 10-K for clues about software demand is reading the wrong section.
Price behavior over the past year reinforces the point. $MSTR's 90-day performance through May 20 was up roughly 28%, while its 30-day performance was down about 3%. The short-term trend is up but the long-term trend remains down, reflecting the equity's amplified sensitivity to Bitcoin price swings in both directions. That amplification is a feature of the capital structure, not a coincidence.
COIN Is an Operating Exchange With a Revenue Mix to Analyze
Coinbase generated $1.41 billion in revenue in the latest quarter. That number comes from transaction fees, custody, staking, and a growing set of financial services products. Bitcoin price affects transaction volume, which affects fee revenue, but the relationship is not one-to-one. A flat Bitcoin market with high retail engagement can produce strong $COIN revenue. A rising Bitcoin market with low retail participation can produce weak $COIN revenue. The operating economics are their own story.
$COIN's risk-factor diff showed 8 added, 8 removed, and 8 materially changed candidates in the most recent annual filing comparison. That is a substantially higher rate of material change than $MSTR's 2 materially changed items, and it reflects the regulatory, competitive, and product-mix risks that an operating exchange faces. Stablecoin legislation, custody rules, and international expansion each generate their own risk-factor language. None of that shows up in $MSTR's filings because $MSTR does not run an exchange.
$COIN's 30-day price performance through May 20 was down about 10%, while its 90-day performance was up roughly 15%. The spread between those two timeframes is wider than IBIT's equivalent spread, which suggests $COIN is absorbing operating-specific pressure beyond what Bitcoin price alone would explain. The revenue mix question, specifically how much of $COIN's top line is durable services revenue versus cyclical transaction fees, is the variable that matters most for understanding that gap.
MARA's Economics Run Through Hash Rate and Energy Cost
Marathon Digital reported 72.2 EH/s of installed hashrate. That number is the starting point for any serious analysis of $MARA. Production economics for a miner depend on hashrate, network difficulty, energy cost per kilowatt-hour, and the Bitcoin price at which mined coins are sold or held. $MARA also holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet, with aggregate fair market value of approximately $2.41 billion as of March 31, 2026, per the May 10 10-Q. That holding creates mark-to-market exposure, but the core operating question is still the cost to produce each coin.
$MARA's risk-factor diff showed 8 added, 8 removed, and 8 materially changed candidates, matching $COIN's rate of change and well above IBIT's 1 materially changed item. Miner risk factors cover energy contract renewals, fleet obsolescence, regulatory treatment of mining operations, and post-halving margin compression. These are operating risks with no analog in a treasury vehicle or an ETF wrapper.
$MARA's price performance has been the strongest of the four on a 90-day basis, up roughly 65% through May 20. The 30-day gain of about 13% held positive while $MSTR and $COIN both pulled back over the same window. That divergence reflects miner-specific dynamics, likely a combination of hashrate growth and the market pricing in post-halving production economics, rather than pure Bitcoin beta.
IBIT Is a Fund, and Fund Analysis Applies
IBIT is a spot Bitcoin ETF. Its filing context is fund reporting: NAV calculation, creation and redemption mechanics, fee disclosure, and custodian arrangements. There are no operating revenues, no management team making capital allocation decisions, and no risk factors tied to product strategy or customer concentration. IBIT's most recent annual filing showed only 1 materially changed risk-factor candidate, compared to 8 for both $COIN and $MARA. That single number captures the difference in filing complexity between a passive fund and an operating company.
IBIT's 30-day performance through May 20 was up roughly 2%, the smallest move of the four. Its 90-day performance of about 15% tracks closely with Bitcoin's own price recovery over that window. That tight tracking is the product working as designed. An investor who wants clean Bitcoin price exposure without operating leverage, management discretion, or mining economics gets it through IBIT. An investor who wants any of those other variables needs a different ticker.
The Category Table Tells the Story
| Ticker | Primary exposure | Key filing section | Dominant operating variable |
|---|---|---|---|
| $MSTR | Bitcoin treasury at scale | Debt, ATM, digital asset accounting | BTC per share and financing cost |
| $COIN | Exchange and financial services | Revenue mix and custody disclosures | Transaction volume and services growth |
| $MARA | Bitcoin mining | Production updates and cost disclosures | Hashrate, energy cost, and coin yield |
| IBIT | Spot Bitcoin ETF wrapper | Fund reporting and NAV mechanics | NAV tracking and fee drag |
The Other Reading
The counter-argument is that Bitcoin price dominates all four equities in a stress scenario, making category distinctions academic when the asset itself drops 30% in a month. $COIN's transaction revenue collapses with volume. $MARA's production economics deteriorate when mined coins are worth less. $MSTR's leveraged treasury position amplifies the drawdown. IBIT tracks spot directly. In that scenario, every category distinction narrows and the correlations converge.
That reading is accurate for tail-risk scenarios. But it does not hold in the more common environment where Bitcoin is range-bound or modestly trending. $COIN's revenue in a flat Bitcoin market depends on product mix and user engagement, not price. $MARA's profitability in a flat market depends on energy contracts and fleet efficiency. $MSTR's equity premium or discount to NAV depends on capital markets access and investor appetite for leveraged Bitcoin exposure. IBIT just tracks the asset. The correlations that converge in a crash diverge again in every other regime, and most of the time investors are not in a crash. The category distinctions are not academic. They are the analysis.
Bitcoin dominance sitting at 58.1% as of the May 22 macro snapshot means the current tape is Bitcoin-led rather than altcoin-driven, which compresses some of the idiosyncratic spread between these tickers in the short run. But the 30-day performance gap between $MARA's roughly 13% gain and $COIN's roughly 10% decline over the same window, against a backdrop of calm Bitcoin realized volatility near 24% annualized, shows that operating-specific factors are already producing meaningful divergence even in a Bitcoin-led environment.
Research only. Not investment advice.