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April 22, 2021
Dear WEALTHTRACK Subscriber,Beware the headline makers! According to Wall Street lore when a financial asset hits the front pages it can signal a turning point, either a recovery if negative, or a fall if positive - one of the most famous examples of course being the 1979 cover of BusinessWeek proclaiming the death of equities. As its successor Bloomberg Businessweek has pointed out many times since, it took three years but the market finally bottomed in 1982 and began the longest bull market on record at that time. What’s making headlines today? Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency related investments, including dogecoin, a meme-inspired cryptocurrency created as a joke in 2013. (For dog lovers the meme is of a Shiba Inu.) At one point this week it reached a market cap of $50 billion, having risen 8,100% so far this year to 39 cents. As The Wall Street Journal reported even its creator thinks it’s nuts. "This is absurd,” said Billy Markus, the co-creator of dogecoin. “I haven’t seen anything like it. It’s one of those things that once it starts going up, it might keep going up.” Dogecoin however is not the real story. Bitcoin, the world’s first and largest digital currency is, as well as Ethereum, the second largest and the blockchain networks they support. And there are other players emerging. Coinbase Global Inc, the largest market exchange for digital currencies went public on the Nasdaq this week and it’s $85 billion market value easily surpassed that of the Nasdaq itself and ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. There is no question that Bitcoin and Coinbase and a few other cryptocurrency related investments have arrived. As we write this Bitcoin’s market value is over one trillion dollars. On Wall Street money talks. Major firms including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock are now offering Bitcoin products to clients. Bitcoin has come a long way since Warren Buffett commented: “It's probably rat poison squared” back in 2018. But how far will it go? Our guest this week had the foresight and guts to get involved in ETFs in their early stages and more recently, in 2018 he threw his energy and career into cryptocurrencies believing they would become the next big, positive innovation for investors. He is Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer and former Global Head of Research at Bitwise Asset Management, a cryptocurrency asset manager founded in 2017 which launched the world’s first and largest cryptocurrency index fund, the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund (BITW) which holds the 10 largest crypto assets weighted by market capitalization. Currently Bitwise manages more than a billion dollars in crypto assets. Bitwise also has several other low cost, liquid crypto asset funds and is working with the SEC to offer them as ETFs. The cryptocurrency world has gone from fringe to close to mainstream since our last conversation a year ago. Hougan will explain what’s driving the transformation, who the key players are, where the industry is going and the implications for investors. In this week’s EXTRA feature, Hougan describes the lessons learned from the pandemic experience. If you miss the show on public television, you can watch it on our website over the weekend. You can also find the WEALTHTRACK podcast on Stitcher and SoundCloud as well as iTunes and Spotify. Thank you for watching. Have a great weekend and make the week ahead a healthy, profitable and productive one. Best regards, Consuelo | 
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