Traders certain Strategy's STRC preferred stock will hit $100

Traders now treat it as certain that Strategy's variable-rate preferred stock, known by its ticker STRC, will reach $100. The outcome has not been confirmed. Bets on it rose steadily through Wednesday, from likely in the early morning to certain by midday.

The likely reason is how close the stock already sits to the mark. Yahoo Finance showed STRC at $99.99, both its price and its intraday high, on Wednesday morning. That is a cent below $100. The quote alone does not show that a qualifying trade has taken place, so the question remains open.

The outcome is defined narrowly. It requires a one-minute price candle on TradingView, the charting service, with a high at or above $100 at any point through the end of November 30. A close near $100 does not count, and neither does a quote on another site.

The odds moved in stages. They were steady in the early hours of Wednesday, then climbed through the morning as the stock edged toward the threshold. By midday traders treated a $100 print as a given.

STRC is Strategy's variable-rate perpetual preferred stock. The company says it adjusts the dividend rate to encourage the shares to trade near their $100 stated amount. That design helps explain why the price keeps hovering just below the line. On Monday, Strategy announced it had repurchased $208 million of STRC.

Yahoo Finance shows the stock closing at $99.28 on Monday and $99.93 on Tuesday. It then touched $99.99 on Wednesday morning, the closest it has come in that stretch.

What comes next is simple. A single one-minute candle at or above $100 on TradingView before the end of November 30, Eastern time, would settle the question. If that data is unavailable, the fallback sources are the Wall Street Journal Markets, Google Finance and MarketWatch, in that order. Until such a candle is confirmed, traders' certainty is an expectation, not a result.