Thank you for joining us today. I'm Michael Saylor, the chairman of Strategy, here with our CEO, Phong Le. At the upcoming shareholder meeting in June, we're putting up for a vote an amendment to modify the dividend frequency of STRC from monthly to semi-monthly. I'm going to update you on the status of Stretch, and Phong is going to discuss that amendment, how it would work, and why we think it's in the best interest of all of our shareholders.
I'd like to start with a few Stretch highlights. Stretch has been enormously successful. It's having a great year. It's one of the fastest-growing, most successful credit instruments ever. In fact, of all the credit instruments we've created — and we've created quite a few of them — Stretch is the one security that I recommend to my friends and my family. And the reason why is it's got this rare combination of high yield, low volatility, and high daily liquidity. It's very simple to understand. And you can see on this dashboard, the Sharpe ratio of Stretch is four and a half. The volatility has hit 1.7% as of the early part of this week. Daily liquidity has marched forward. It's now $339 million a day. That's really quite extraordinary. I mean, the average daily liquidity of a preferred stock can be a million a day, so it's orders of magnitude better. Stretch is over-collateralized by 4.3x, so $4.30 worth of Bitcoin for every dollar of Stretch outstanding. And so what's the result of that? Just tremendous growth, a lot of market enthusiasm.
Now, how does Stretch compare to other credit instruments? Well, 11.5% yield is really the headline, and it's 3x more yield than you get from a money market. It's almost 2x what you get from many other corporate credit instruments or bank preferreds. And of course, if you pay taxes as a retail investor or corporate investor, then the return-of-capital dividend is a big advantage to you. It results in a tax-equivalent yield of 18% or even more. That combination of the high yield combined with low volatility creates a tremendous Sharpe ratio. And you can see here the Sharpe ratio of Stretch — the return minus the risk-free rate divided by the volatility — is an order of magnitude better than comparable credit instruments.
That Sharpe ratio is even stronger than traditional equities. If you look at the performance of the Mag 7 equities over the past five years, and in what we call the Bitcoin standard era since August of 2020, you can see that only Nvidia is outperforming its volatility. Stretch, on the other hand, more than 2x Nvidia. And we benchmark Stretch versus asset classes, and most asset classes over the last five years aren't outperforming their own volatility. And so you can see BTC and the S&P index are 0.83, Stretch four, four and a half. So Stretch is just a really tremendous financial product.
The result of that is no surprise. It's growing rapidly, from the IPO up to $6.5 billion in less than a year. And with that rapid growth in AUM is a rapid growth in liquidity, almost by a factor of 10x over five months. We've done everything that we can to decrease the volatility of Stretch, and we have many different levers to do that, including adjustable monthly dividend rates and an at-the-market shelf registration. Now, the result of that was volatility falling from 13% to about 2% since the launch. But we're thinking, how do we decrease the volatility even more? Just like we're always thinking, how can we improve this credit instrument? And we've decided that if we double the frequency of the credit instrument, it'll make it twice as good. So to discuss the details on that and explain how it will work, why we think it's a good idea, and what the benefits would be for our shareholders, is Phong Le.
