MSCI’s Preliminary List Marks Strategy Deleted. Three Canadian Names Are on Its Watchlist.
MSCI has published the preliminary list of current index constituents that its new non-operating company rule could catch, and Strategy is the largest name on it marked for deletion. The rule makes companies that accumulate assets rather than run a business ineligible for MSCI’s global equity indexes as of the close of November 30, 2026, and it is set out in MSCI’s announcement of the consultation result, published October 15. The list names 22 securities: five marked “Deleted” and 17 on a watchlist. Three of the 22 are Canadian, and all three are investment companies.
The preliminary list, all 22 names
The file, published at MSCI’s index consultations page, is titled “List of MSCI GIMI Securities Potentially Impacted by the Non-Operating Companies Methodology”. The announcement calls it “the list of current constituents that will potentially be impacted”, and on that wording the file covers companies already inside an MSCI index. That scope decides what it can tell you: a company that is not an MSCI constituent would not appear here whether it passes the screens or fails them.
| Security (MSCI’s spelling) | Country | Size | Issuer mcap (USD mln) | Float-adjusted (USD mln) | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STRATEGY A | USA | Large Cap | 43,322.71 | 40,291.44 | Deleted |
| YELLOW CAKE | United Kingdom | Small Cap | 1,803.00 | 1,803.00 | Deleted |
| METAPLANET | Japan | Small Cap | 1,004.89 | 803.91 | Deleted |
| SKEL FJARFESTINGAFELAG | Iceland | Small Cap | 257.13 | 102.85 | Deleted |
| UPEXI | USA | Micro Cap | 64.78 | 45.34 | Deleted |
| SHARPLINK | USA | Small Cap | 813.67 | 244.10 | on Watchlist |
| URBANA CORP NV A | Canada | Micro Cap | 248.87 | 185.19 | on Watchlist |
| STACK CAPITAL GROUP | Canada | Micro Cap | 187.87 | 173.78 | on Watchlist |
| CANTON STRATEGIC HLDG | USA | Micro Cap | 162.73 | 142.39 | on Watchlist |
| CYPHERPUNK TECHNOLOGIES | USA | Micro Cap | 166.56 | 116.59 | on Watchlist |
| SUI GRP HLDGS | USA | Micro Cap | 107.52 | 91.40 | on Watchlist |
| TON STRATEGY | USA | Micro Cap | 182.03 | 81.91 | on Watchlist |
| CAPITAL B | France | Micro Cap | 82.35 | 65.88 | on Watchlist |
| SOLANA COMPANY A (US) | USA | Micro Cap | 96.31 | 62.60 | on Watchlist |
| DEFI DEV CORP | USA | Micro Cap | 84.69 | 50.81 | on Watchlist |
| LOGISTICS DEV GROUP | United Kingdom | Micro Cap | 110.83 | 49.87 | on Watchlist |
| FLAT CAPITAL B | Sweden | Micro Cap | 396.39 | 49.73 | on Watchlist |
| HELIOS FAIRFAX PARTNR SV | Canada | Micro Cap | 236.08 | 46.08 | on Watchlist |
| TRENDLINES GROUP | Israel | Micro Cap | 56.80 | 21.30 | on Watchlist |
| AI FINANCIAL | USA | Micro Cap | 55.02 | 19.07 | on Watchlist |
| ENLIVEX | Israel | Micro Cap | 0.40 | 0.40 | on Watchlist |
| GD CULTURE GRP | USA | Micro Cap | 0.30 | 0.06 | on Watchlist |
Source: MSCI’s preliminary list, financial information as of September 30, 2026, market capitalizations as of October 9, 2026.
Float-adjusted market cap on the list runs from Strategy’s $40,291.44 million USD down to Enlivex at $0.40 million USD and GD Culture Group at $0.06 million USD.
The watchlist is the softer outcome. MSCI’s consultation footnote defines a watchlist name as a constituent “failing the core and exclusion screens based on latest filings, but not failing for two consecutive years”, removed only if it fails the screens again the following year.
Preliminary means preliminary. The August consultation ran the proposed screen on MSCI ACWI IMI data as of May 2026 and produced three deletions, Strategy, Yellow Cake plc and Metaplanet, and three watchlist names, Center Laboratories, Lydia Holding and SharpLink. Five months later the live list carries five deletions and 17 watchlist names, and two of the three May watchlist names, Center Laboratories and Lydia Holding, are not on it. The final list arrives November 11, 2026 with the November 2026 Index Review, and November 30 is the close at which the change takes effect.
The measure being retired froze companies. The new one removes them.
The same announcement retires the crypto-specific rule that has governed this space for a year. MSCI “will discontinue, effective with the November 2026 Index Review, the interim measures announced on October 10, 2025 in respect of the preliminary list of companies whose digital asset holdings represented 50% or more of total assets, including the freeze on Number of Shares, Foreign Inclusion Factor and Domestic Inclusion Factor increases and the deferral of additions and size-segment migrations for those securities.”
A frozen company was still a constituent. What the announcement enumerates is a freeze on increases in Number of Shares and the two inclusion factors, which is the index declining to follow new issuance, and a deferral of additions and size-segment migrations. No removal appears among them. The replacement is not written around digital assets at all, and its outcome is removal. Ending a 50% crypto threshold reads like a reprieve. It is a substitution, and the thing substituted in is stricter.
One gate, then five ratios
A company clears the gate if Operating Assets divided by Total Assets is above 50%. Fail that and MSCI applies an exclusion screen built on “five non-industry-specific financial ratios”, under the rule that “a security will be ineligible for index inclusion if it is flagged on four or more of the five ratios.” The August consultation sets each proposed threshold on page 8.
| Ratio | What MSCI says it measures | Flagged if |
|---|---|---|
| Operating asset intensity | “share of total assets that are operating / used as business inputs” | Operating Assets / Total Assets below 20% |
| Expense intensity | “spending on activities associated with business operations” | Operating Expenses / Total Assets below 5% |
| Cash flow screen | “value generation from business activity” | Operating Cash Flow below 0 |
| Fair value intensity | “magnitude of fair value changes relative to operating revenue and asset base” | Absolute non-operating fair value changes above 5% of Total Assets AND above 50% of Net Sales plus absolute fair value changes |
| Capital dependence | “reliance on external financing to fund asset accumulation” | Financing Cash Flow above 20% of Total Assets AND capital raising for asset accumulation in company filings in the latest 12 months |
Source: the August consultation, page 8. These are the proposed regular thresholds, the ones a company trying to get in would have to clear. MSCI implemented the proposal “with minor modifications” and says the specific final thresholds live in “Appendix I of the MSCI Global Investible Market Indexes methodology”.
Companies already inside the index get more room and more time. Page 10 of the consultation sets the room, calling it “less stringent thresholds”: operating asset intensity flags a non-constituent below 20% but an existing constituent only below 10%. The October 15 announcement sets the timing, and current constituents “will be removed only if they fail the ineligibility screen in each of the two most recent annual filing periods.”
One of the minor modifications is visible between the August consultation and the October 15 announcement. In August, the evidence standard for a company outside the index was “Latest filing only”, stated on page 9 and repeated on page 10. The announcement makes non-constituents ineligible for addition if they fail “in either of their two most recent annual filing periods”. On the plain reading of the two documents, one clean year no longer buys a company back in.
A uranium vehicle is on the same list as a Bitcoin treasury
Yellow Cake plc shows what kind of rule this is. Its own website, retrieved October 17, 2026, states a current holding of 24.37 million pounds of uranium oxide concentrate, and offers “long-term exposure to the uranium spot price in a low-risk, low-cost, liquid and publicly quoted vehicle”. The asset is irrelevant here. The structure is the test.
The screen measures a balance sheet, not an industry, and MSCI drew that line deliberately. Page 3 of the consultation describes a non-operating company as one whose performance is “driven by market movements, not other revenue-generating activities”.
Capital dependence, the fifth ratio, is about companies that raise outside money to buy more of the asset, and what that funding costs the shareholder is the subject of Strive’s 15% Bitcoin preferred, where the Bitcoin held per share fell.
Canada’s three names are investment companies, not crypto companies
Three Canadian securities sit on the watchlist, and they are the complete Canadian presence on the list. All three are micro caps, and as the list stands none of the three is being removed in November. What could still move a name before the final list is the evidence behind it: the announcement adds that MSCI “may also use the most recent interim filing if available.”
Not one of the three is a crypto company, and each says what it is on its own website, retrieved October 17, 2026. Urbana Corporation calls itself “an investment company combining publicly traded securities with private investments”, and MSCI’s row is its non-voting class A. Stack Capital Group, under the ticker “TSX:STCK”, is “your key to investing in some of the world’s most innovative and disruptive pre-IPO companies”. Helios Fairfax Partners Corporation “(HFPC.U-TSX) is an investment holding company whose objective is to achieve long-term capital appreciation, while preserving capital, by investing in African businesses”.
That three investment companies were constituents at all is a matter of legal form. Page 2 of the consultation puts funds and BDCs, “currently ineligible for GIMI inclusion based on legal form”, in the same definition as “corporate issuers with similar characteristics, identified through quantitative screens”. All three were index constituents, which means the form test did not exclude them. The ratios are what reach them now.
Urbana’s website also publishes what its portfolio is worth. Net assets per share were $14.48 CAD on October 9, 2026, the date of MSCI’s market capitalizations, and the non-voting class A closed that day at $8.42 CAD on Yahoo Finance data, a 41.9% discount. MSCI’s market capitalizations are built on market prices, so the $185.19 million USD float it records against Urbana reflects the $8.42, not the net asset value behind it.
Helios Fairfax carries the thinnest float of the three, $46.08 million USD against $236.08 million USD at the issuer level, under a fifth of it, and float-adjusted size is what index weight is built on.
The measure being retired was written explicitly around companies “whose digital asset holdings represented 50% or more of total assets”. Its replacement has three Canadian investment companies on its watchlist, and no Canadian crypto company is named among the 22. HIVE Digital, which fell 8.28% on Friday, is not named on it; our page ranking Canadian crypto stocks on Bitcoin per share has Strategy second.
The moves do not line up with the list
Equity closes are from Yahoo Finance. The 08:48 PM GMT stamp is 16:48 ET, after the US close, and the Tokyo, Reykjavik, London and Toronto sessions all opened after it, so October 16 was the first session that could price the decision. The week before runs to the October 15 close.
Of the five companies the list marks for deletion, two fell on Friday, two rose and one was unchanged. Strategy fell 9.56% and Upexi 8.11%, Yellow Cake rose 0.76% and Metaplanet 4.53%, and SKEL Fjarfestingafelag closed unchanged.
Four listed crypto operators we priced as a comparison, none of them named on the list, all fell on Friday: Galaxy Digital 11.56%, Hut 8 10.96%, MARA Holdings 9.60% and HIVE Digital 8.28%, all four having fallen in the week before as well. Bitcoin fell 0.78% on Friday and 0.49% in the week before. All three Canadian names on the watchlist moved less on Friday than any of those four, between zero and 4.65%.
What the flagged names did not do is move together. Across the twelve securities on the list we priced, Friday ran from plus 4.53% at Metaplanet to minus 14.90% at Cypherpunk Technologies, a watchlist name, and the deepest move in the week before, minus 14.60% at TON Strategy, belongs to a watchlist name too. Forced selling is hard to square with that spread.
The objection is size. Passive money tracks weight, and Strategy carries $40,291.44 million USD of float-adjusted market cap as of October 9, 2026, against SharpLink’s $244.10 million USD. Both have grown since the consultation ran: its May 2026 column, headed “FIF Mcap (USD mln)”, put Strategy at 23,931 and SharpLink at 165, up 68% and 48% in five months, while Yellow Cake went from 1,807 to 1,803.00, four million dollars lower. On Friday, Strategy did fall hardest of the five marked for deletion, though over the week to October 16 Upexi fell slightly more, 11.45% against 11.35%. It still fell less on Friday than Galaxy Digital at 11.56%, Hut 8 at 10.96% and MARA Holdings at 9.60%, none of which the list names, and less over the week than all four of them.
Why any of them moved is not something a day’s tape answers, which is the discipline our guide to what moves a stock price is built on.
As this publishes, Bitcoin (BTC) trades at $81,474 USD, or $115,337 CAD, down 0.03%, and Ethereum (ETH) at $2,431 USD, or $3,441 CAD, up 0.45%, data as of 08:05 ET on October 17, 2026.
The distinction that will matter in November
The distinction is between a company frozen inside an index, which the retiring October 2025 measure did, and one removed from it, which the new screen can do. The preliminary list says who is in the frame; the final one lands November 11. It does not sort the week’s selling: on October 16 the best performer among the names we priced was one MSCI has marked for deletion.
Disclaimer: The content on bestcanadianstocks.ca is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. Every figure here comes from MSCI’s own documents and from the companies’ own disclosures. The 22 securities, their market capitalizations and their actions are transcribed from MSCI’s file “List of MSCI GIMI Securities Potentially Impacted by the Non-Operating Companies Methodology”, downloaded October 17, 2026, whose own header dates the financial information to September 30, 2026 and the market capitalizations to October 9, 2026. That list is preliminary; MSCI publishes the final one on November 11, 2026. The rule, its thresholds and the May 2026 simulation come from MSCI’s October 15, 2026 announcement and its August 2026 consultation, whose pages 5, 8 and 10 were read from the document itself. Share price changes are daily closes from Yahoo Finance. Urbana, Stack Capital, Helios Fairfax and Yellow Cake are quoted from their own websites, retrieved October 17, 2026. Bitcoin and Ethereum quotes are as of 08:05 ET on October 17, 2026.
