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by charlesdm 3115 days ago
Crypto has been one of the better performing asset classes in the last 5 years. That is just a fact -- if looking in percentage terms.

Pension funds generally allocate up to 5% of their portfolio to alternatives, which could be smaller funds investing in art, watches, music royalty rights, farmland, wine, and the likes. This also includes crypto.

If you're an investment manager, it isn't necessarily crazy to allocate 0.2 or 0.5% of your portfolio to crypto and try to capture some of those gains.
1 comments
TFortunato 3114 days ago
Absolutely -- To the parent: think of it this way. If you had $200 in your fund last year to invest last year, and put $1 into crypto, then at worst, you lose that entire $1, and your portfolio is down to $199 (notwithstanding what you did with the other money), a loss of 0.5%. If you happened to pick Litecoin, and bought 0.25 LTC when they were at a stable price of $4 a piece, today that 0.25 LTC would be worth $80, giving you $280 in your fund, or a gain of 40% in your total portfolio value. You can look at ETH, Bitcoin as well and also see large gains.

Even without perfect timing of the market, it's a pretty easy decision for a portfolio manager to look at this and say: "While, like any other asset, past performance isn't an indicator of future performance, given the price history and increasing trading volume over time, the risk/reward balance skews heavily in favor of putting at least some tiny bit of money into crypto for all but the most risk-averse."

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amscanne 3102 days ago
You and your parent comment are describing a kind of hedge, not a material investment. That’s fine but did not seem to be what my parent was implying. Funds may just as well choose to maintain several points in cash (also not a productive asset).

The analysis presented is a bit disingenuous. If you put money into every thing that could pop 400x, you’d have no money. Pension funds in particular need to be conservative and even if they’re doing “risky” things like venture capital for example, they would want late stage funds — lower returns, lower risk.

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