5th April 2024 > > Warren & ETFs.

tl;dr

Warren’s anti-crypto army ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. The BTC demand shock gets another fillip.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Three days of positive inflows to the ETFs gave us a little pop in the price of BTC yesterday evening, but the enthusiasm was dampened overnight. A bunch of leveraged shorts got taken out with a rapid move to $69k but once they had lost their collateral, there seemingly wasn’t any follow-through.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Warren’s anti-crypto army

One of Senator Ellizabeth’s high-profile recruits to her self-proclaimed “anti-crypto army” is none other than Jamie “you cannot fire me” Dimon, long-time CEO of J.P. Morgan.

In a senate hearing last December, under pre-arranged questioning from Warren, Dimon stated for the record his personal take on cryptos:

“… if I was the government, I would close it down”.

Which doesn’t sound particularly liberal to me. Then again, he is great friends with Justin Trudeau, Premier of Canada, so that probably explains his attitude.

…

But perhaps Warren’s army is not all it is cracked up to be. Dimon has “clarified” (i.e. a total screeching U-turn the sound of which is still reverberating around the world) with this comment:

“I don’t know what the bitcoin itself is for, but I defend your right to smoke a cigarette, I’ll defend your right to buy a bitcoin."

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Spot BTC ETFs

Regular readers are very familiar with the idea that the approval of spot BTC ETFs back in January was only the start of the process. Most investment managers, and most investment platforms are yet to list these products as approved – there is always an internal legal and compliance process to complete. The onboarding of clients is a slow burn, though in some cases such as Vanguard, no-one bought any matches to start with.

Morgan Stanley and UBS are expected to add spot BTC ETFs to their investment platforms next week.

This is great news. Morgan Stanley has $4.9 TRILLION of assets in its wealth management business. UBS is just shy of $4 TRILLION. None of this investment money could get exposure to BTC before now. If my long-term target of 5% of assets are heading BTC’s way, that is nearly half a trillion of investment dollars that will go into the ETFs. Not next week of course, but the direction of travel is plain.

But it gets better than that.

Once these two have moved, then others will follow, and rapidly. The demand shock builds by the day.