How to read a treasury disclosure

A company’s own report is the ground truth for what it holds. Headlines round the numbers, trackers can lag, and press releases quote the figure that flatters most. The actual filing gives you three things you can trust: how many coins the company owns, what it paid for them, and the date that figure was true. Once you know where each one lives, checking a holding takes about two minutes.

US public companies file their numbers with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and those filings are free to read on the SEC’s public database. The two that matter most are the quarterly report (filed four times a year) and the annual report (filed once a year, and the most detailed). When a company makes a big move between those — a large purchase, for instance — it files a short event report within a few days to disclose it.

Most treasury companies also restate the figure on an investor-relations or treasury page on their own website. That’s a fine quick reference, but the filing is what’s legally binding — when the two disagree, the filing wins.

The coin count is the headline number: how many bitcoin, ether, or SOL the company owns. In a quarterly or annual report, look on the balance sheetfor a line naming the asset — often “digital assets” or the coin by name — and then in the notes that follow, where companies spell out the exact unit count. The balance sheet shows the dollar value; the notes usually give you the actual number of coins.

The cost basisis what the company actually paid for its coins, in total and often per coin. It tells you whether the position is in profit or underwater at today’s price, and it anchors the average price you’ll see quoted elsewhere.

Under the older accounting approach you’ll see a costfigure alongside a separate, often lower, “carrying value” — the result of past write-downs. Under the current fair-value rule the holding is shown at today’s market value, and the cost is disclosed nearby so you can still see what was spent. Either way, the number you want is the cumulative cost, and dividing it by the coin count gives the average price paid.

Every figure in a filing is true as of a specific date, and there are two dates that can confuse you:

• The filing date.The day the document was officially submitted. This is the date we use to place a move on a timeline, because it’s the day the figure became public record.
• The period-end date. The last day of the quarter or year the report covers — usually a few weeks before the filing date. The coin count is the count as of this date.

For an event report announcing a purchase, the filing date is your best anchor for “when did the market learn about this.” For a quarterly or annual report, the coin count reflects the period-end date — so a holding can already be stale by the time you read it if the company has kept buying since.

• Open the most recent quarterly or annual report, plus any event report filed since.
• On the balance sheet, find the digital-assets line; in the notes, read off the exact coin count and confirm the units.
• Note the cumulative cost, and divide by the coin count for the average price paid.
• Check the period-end date the count is “as of,” and ask whether anything has likely changed since.

That’s the same routine we run on every holding before we publish it — see how we verify holdings.