At the Money: Crypto Curious. November 26, 2024
Are you crypto-curious? Are you interested in owning some bitcoin, Ethereum, or other crypto-coins? How can investors get exposure to the space?
Full transcript below.
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About this week’s guest: Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise Asset Management discusses the best ways to responsibly manage crypto assets. His firm runs over $10 billion in client crypto assets.
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Responsible Crypto Investing Matt Hougan
How should retail investors responsibly think about crypto?
Are you crypto-curious? Are you interested in owning – maybe some Bitcoin or Ethereum or some other crypto coins? How should ordinary investors interested in the cryptocurrency space get exposure to that asset?
I’m Barry Ritholtz, and on today’s edition of At the Money, we’re going to discuss how retail investors can responsibly invest in crypto.
To help us unpack all of this and what it means for your portfolio, let’s bring in Matt Hogan. He is the chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, the firm manages over 10 billion in client assets in crypto.
Let’s start with just the basics, Matt. For the longest time, it’s been challenging and difficult to own crypto. There were wallets and coins and crazy passwords, lots of hacks and other problems. Tell us about what’s going on in the world of actually owning cryptocurrencies.
Matt Hougan: It’s great to be here, Barry. It’s getting a lot easier to own crypto, you know, in the past, this was a new disruptive market. It was challenging. You had to write down your secret password and not lose it. There are all these terrible stories about people losing passwords that are now, you know, would have gotten them a hundred million dollars or whatever.
But this is just like any other technology you and I remember when the internet. was hard to use. I remember looking up websites in a book, which I now sounds absolutely insane, but technology has advanced. It’s now easy to get high quality access and secure access to crypto if you use the right tools.
Barry Ritholtz: Really interesting. So it sounds like the wild west of crypto has been tamed a little bit. There certainly has been a push by well-known financial institutions into the space. You can own crypto coins and ETFs. You can own them in closed-end funds. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of the various ways and methodologies of owning this?
Matt Hougan: I have to say I’m a huge fan of the ETFs. Uh, you know, obviously, we offer them, so I’m talking my book, but broadly speaking, the ETFs came out in January of this year, and they let you own crypto at such low cost and with such institutional quality, custody, and trading. Retail investors today can get the same sort of setup that the largest institutions in the world were getting in crypto a year or two ago.
So, these ETFs make it easy to buy exposure to Bitcoin in a brokerage account and know that the crypto or the Bitcoin is being held by an institutional regulated custodian with insurance in place with all the bells and whistles, but they don’t have to worry about it. Five years ago, you had to worry about that personally. The ETFs have sort of taken that complexity away and made it cheap and safe to own.
Barry Ritholtz: And you’re really a fascinating person to talk to about this because you come from the ETF side of the industry. You spent how many years, 20 years working on ETFs? Tell us a little bit about your background and what led you into the crypto side to come up with ways to put coins in ETFs.
Matt Hougan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 20 years in the ETF industry, the CEO of ETF.com. There are actually so many parallels between ETFs and crypto. I know ETFs today are the apple pie of investing. They’re Everyone’s favorite tool. But 20 years ago, they were considered risky and disruptive and hard to access. The Financial Times called them weapons of mass destruction. There were congressional hearings, Barry, about ETFs destroying the American dream, if you can believe it.
But ETFs had this core advantage, which were they were lower cost, they were more tax efficient, they were easier to use. And over time, the world woke up to the reality.
The same thing’s happening in crypto. You can see it before your eyes. A few years ago, Larry Fink called Bitcoin an index of money laundering. Today, he’s talking about it transforming the world of currency and he holds more Bitcoin than almost anyone else. So it’s going in that direction, and absolutely you’re seeing these two worlds come together, where this new financial innovation of crypto is now being packaged in this beautiful package of an ETF and making it easy for every investor to access. It’s a beautiful thing.
Barry Ritholtz: And I want to talk a little bit about the, the safety aspect and the institutionalization. None of the coins are regulated. It very much has been the Wild-West. You’re not a crypto exchange. You’re a fund manager. You’re a financial manager. Who is the regulatory authority that supervises bitwise?
Matt Hougan: Yeah. All of them. We have all the letters, all the letters, Barry. Um, you know, we’re regulated by the sec because even though the crypto assets aren’t the funds that we offer, the ETFs that we offer.
We are regulated and passed through the SEC. Of course, also the CFTC for products that hold futures contracts; FINRA which is another regulator has oversight over broker-dealers. And so our distribution team sits under that. All our materials are reviewed by FINRA, the NFA. It’s an alphabet soup of regulators, but it’s a good thing for investors because one thing that is true about crypto is in the early wild, wild, west days, when you had offshore exchanges doing shady things, people lost money.
A great thing that has happened is that has moved. into these regulated formats like ETFs. So you do have some protections from the SEC, the CFTC, FINRA, the NFA and others. And of course, Bitwise sits within those protections as an RIA.
Barry Ritholtz: That’s really interesting. So, so you’re a regulated entity, where do the ETFs and various funds get custodied? How are they held? Who does the administrative reporting? I think of these as complex questions for a coin, but really they’re kind of run of the mill questions for an SEC regulated Entity like Bitwise
Matt Hougan: It looks exactly like or very similar to any other etf manager So the crypto assets are held in a regulated qualified custodian in the case of our bitcoin ETF It’s coinbase custody, which is the largest crypto custodian in the world. The funds are audited by big four auditors in our case it’s KPMG They’re administered by firms like Bank of New York. If you looked at the sort of stack of participants, it would look just like, you know, a traditional equity ATM. And that’s what it should do, right? These are trusted rails that have been proven over years, and we’ve just applied them to crypto to give similar protections to crypto investors.
Barry Ritholtz: So the one thing that I find kind of amusing and ironic. Is the whole DeFi nonsense, the decentralized finance turns out to have been a narrative that kind of faded away because crypto for all the talk about “outside of the financial system” has been dragged kicking and screaming right into the heart of the financial system.
Matt Hougan: I admit that there is an irony there, but I actually think It’s more of a continuum. Sort of the core idea of DeFi is that the existing financial system is too slow, too intermediated, too costly. And all of that is true. DeFi offers the potential to improve that,
But of course the two systems have to come together. And you’re seeing it. So you’re seeing, from the crypto side, the launch of ETFs. Moving into the traditional financial system. But you also have firms like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton issuing money market funds on public blockchains like Ethereum. So you are seeing this coming together. I wouldn’t write off DeFi 1.0, Barry. I think there’ll be a DeFi 2.0 that is much more significant.
Barry Ritholtz: So let’s talk about individuals who want to own crypto. What sort of strategies do they deploy? Is it Bitcoin or bust, or should they own Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a bunch of other coins? Give us some investment strategies.
Matt Hougan: Without telling anyone exactly what to do, I’m an index investor at heart, right? This is a disruptive early market. My family owned a Betamax, I remember using a BlackBerry, it’s hard to know exactly how this market will turn out in the future. So. I think taking a diversified approach to this market is probably a sensible approach for many investors.
There’s certainly people who are Bitcoin only, who only care about the monetary aspects of crypto, but in any disruptive technology, my history, you know, having grown up through the tech bubble, you tells me that a diversified approach may be a good idea for many investors.
Barry Ritholtz: Makes a lot of sense. Whenever I talk about stocks to an investor, I always warn them, “Hey, listen, you know, you get a 10 to 20% pullback two out of every three years, and a 20% comes along just about every third year. With crypto. I love the expression crypto winter. And we’ve had a number of them when for a year or two crypto currencies can be down, you know, 50 percent or worse. We’ve probably had three of them over the past, you know, 10 or so years.
So how should investors prepare themselves for what seems to be an inevitable drawdown?
Matt Hougan: It’s a really important question. People ask me all the time what the biggest risk in crypto. Is it regulatory? Is it technical? Is it quantum computing? It’s none of those things. The biggest risk is behavioral risk by investors who either chase prices when they go up, or sell when prices go down, this is an asset that has huge volatility. You’re going to get 30, 40, 50% drawdowns in the future. I feel confident about that. As you mentioned, we’ve seen those in the past and there’s no reason to expect that will change.
For investors, what that means is two things. One, you need a long-term discipline. If you’re buying Bitcoin for the next week, I have no idea where it’s going. I’m optimistic over the next handful of years. And the second, is you need to size your portfolio appropriately. Don’t put in so much that if it pulls back 50%, you’re going to panic and sell because that is the worst-case scenario. You’re better just sitting on the sidelines, put in a small amount if you’re going to invest so you can handle that up and down and it won’t overly impact what you’re doing.
Barry Ritholtz: So you mentioned price – Bitcoin goes way up. It goes way down – is there a way of looking at these from a fundamental perspective? How do we value coins other than whatever their last trade was?
Matt Hougan: Unfortunately a little bit complex. Bitcoin’s valuation technique is different from other crypto assets like Ethereum.
When you think about Bitcoin, what I think Bitcoin is trying to become is a digital version of gold; a way to store money outside of central banks in a digital format. And we have digital versions of everything. We have digital versions of newspapers. We have digital versions of ads. I think the world and younger generations want a digital version of gold.
The reason I raised that is you can look at Bitcoin today. It’s a little under $2 trillion. You can look at gold. It’s a little under 20 trillion. Do you think it’ll get half that market? Well, then you think Bitcoin will 5x from here. Do you think it’ll get, that full market you’re more optimistic, or do you think it’ll be less successful? That’s actually the best way to value Bitcoin.
These other crypto assets like Ethereum are different. They actually have cashflow-like characteristics. So they behave a little bit more like stocks. They’re more sort of fundamentally valued then Bitcoin, which is this monetary asset. So you have to think of the two different sets of assets a little differently.
Barry Ritholtz: So you and I are both index guys. That’s, that’s our background. If I’m an investor and I want to put 2 or 3% of my portfolio into coins, what do I do? Do I tell us about some of the options that you guys have? Should I be go 2X-levered Bitcoin or am I better off with, Hey, here are the five biggest coins or 10 biggest coins and own them all.
Matt Hougan: I wouldn’t go 2X-levered Bitcoin. Uh, you know, Bitcoin is volatile enough. Um, I think investors can make a choice within the ETF space. The only coins that we have access to are Bitcoin and Ethereum. And the good news is those are the two largest assets. They’re the leaders in their spaces.
So you can do worse than go two parts Bitcoin and one part ETH.
And have at least broad-based exposure. If you want to be more diversified and take an index-based approach, you know, we have bitwise have the largest crypto index fund it’s available in a wrapper, but that wrapper is more like a closed-end fund. So it can trade at premiums. And discounts, and you have to be aware that you have that extra layer of volatility. Either approach can make sense for the right investor, as long as you understand what you’re getting into.
Barry Ritholtz: So I want to not get too lost in the weeds on the technical issues, but I keep hearing about the having that’s coming up and what does that mean? What should lay people understand about this?
Matt Hougan:. If you think about Bitcoin, when it was created way back in 2008-09, there were no Bitcoin in existence. And we all know, or many of us know that eventually there’ll be 21 million Bitcoin. The way we get from zero to 21 million is every day, a little bit more Bitcoin is issued. What the halving refers to, Barry, is that every four years. The amount of Bitcoin that’s issued falls in half. And the last halving was earlier this year, right? It dropped in half. What that means is there’s less new supply coming into the market.
In the end, Bitcoin’s price is set by supply and demand. You have all these people buying Bitcoin through the ETF and other means. And then you have supply – and supply is either this newly developed Bitcoin or existing people selling it. So what the halving does is it reduces the amount of supply in the market. If I told you that the amount of oil coming out of the ground would fall in half tomorrow, you might be bullish on oil.
The same sort of narrative is true in Bitcoin. The amount of Bitcoin coming out of the ground, if you will, falls in half every four years, and we’re just sort of starting to feel the impact of the most recent halving now.
Barry Ritholtz: All of these challenges, whether it’s the limited amount of supply, that halving should be fairly well known by investors. None of these are surprise. It’s not like an earning surprise. Hey, everybody who’s a Bitcoin investor understands these.
So the question becomes what are going to be the future drivers of Bitcoin return? Should we be thinking about Bitcoin like a commodity, like a currency? You know, you mentioned, just under $2 trillion in market cap for Bitcoin that puts it somewhere between Meta and Alphabet, Facebook and Google – do we think about this like a large tech company? How should we contextualize the coins themselves?
Matt Hougan: I think of Bitcoin specifically as a commodity. It’s a commodity with scarce supply and its price is set by supply and demand.
One of the reasons I’m so optimistic about Bitcoin right now is we have major new sources of demand. Institutional investors are just now buying Bitcoin. There’s talk of the U. S. government acquiring one million Bitcoin. Corporations are acquiring Bitcoin. None of that was true in a major way a year ago or two years ago. And so you have all this new demand.
But unlike other commodities, Unlike gold, unlike oil, unlike copper, you can have all the demand in the world. You don’t get any more supply. The supply is literally fixed. It’s pre-programmed. So when you think about: Are you optimistic or pessimistic on Bitcoin? I like to think about that supply/demand dynamic. And from what I see, there’s a lot more demand coming online and limited new supply coming online. That makes me optimistic.
It’s not a guarantee. We can see some of those things not materialize. We can see investors scared off, but I like the long term framing of it from that simple supply demand perspective.
Barry Ritholtz: Investors who are crypto-curious can buy various coins today much more easily than you used to be able to. If you wanted to own any sort of coin, you could buy it in a or even easier in an ETF.
Be very aware that you have to position size appropriately. Hey, if you want to own a percent or three in your portfolio (of your liquid net worth) the responsible way to do this is not through a leveraged product, not anything that’s reflective of the old Wild West ethos of crypto, but a traditional ETF. You have a small position as you would for any particular company and be aware of your own behavior when it comes to managing yourself around the volatility of Bitcoin.
I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Bloomberg’s at the money.
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