On Monday (November 9), American billionaire investor Stanley Freeman Druckenmiller, who was highly skeptical of Bitcoin as recently as last June, now owns Bitcoin as part of his investment portfolio.
67-year-old Druckenmiller, who was named in this year’s Forbes 400 list as the 167th richest person in America with a personal fortune estimated to be worth $4.4 billion.
Druckenmiller started his career as an equities analyst at Pittsburgh National Bank. Then in 1981, he founded investment firm Duquesne Capital Management, which had a positive return every year until he decided in August 2010 to quit the hedge fund business and close his firm.
According to a report published by the New York Times (NYT) on 18 August 2010, Druckenmiller wrote the following in a letter to investors to explain why he wanted to stop being a hedge fund manager:
“I have had to recognize that competing in the markets over such a long time frame imposes heavy personal costs,” he wrote. “While the joy of winning for clients is immense, for me the disappointment of each interim drawdown over the years has taken a cumulative toll that I cannot continue to sustain.”
Between 1988 and 2000, Druckenmiller was the lead portfolio manager for Quantum Fund, which was started by George Soros and Jim Rogers in 1973. In 1992, this hedge fund made a successful $10 billion bet against the British Pound (GBP).
According to the NYT report, Soros and Druckenmiller pioneered a new style of hedge fund trading:
“With Mr. Soros, Mr. Druckenmiller helped pioneer an investment strategy that today is referred to as macro trading. They married two different strands of investing. On one hand, the two fund managers placed large bets on global currencies and commodities by watching charts and focusing on political trends. But they also engaged in old-fashioned stock picking, researching companies through fundamental security analysis.”
According to a report by Cointelegraph on 4 June 2019, which was based on a Bloomberg report published earlier that day, Druckenmiller said during an interview with Scott Bessent, founder of Key Square Capital Management at The Economic Club of New York, that he did not consider himself a “neanderthal” just because he didn’t believe in Bitcoin, that he did own any Bitcoin, and that he didn’t want to either go short or long the flagship cryptocurrency.
Well, it now appears that the legendary investor, who now manages his wealth via the Duquesne Family Office, feels differently about Bitcoin since yesterday during an interview with CNBC he admitted that he owned some Bitcoin as part of his investment portfolio (unfortunately, he did not mention the amount of BTC he is holding).
Here is Druckenmiller explaining why he now likes Bitcoin (even though he holds a larger position in gold):
“Bitcoin could be an asset class that has a lot of attraction as a store of value to both millennials and the new West Coast money — and, as you know, they got a lot of it,” said the billionaire. “It’s been around for 13 years and with each passing day it picks up more of its stabilization as a brand…
“I own many many more times gold than I own Bitcoin. But frankly if the gold bet works, the Bitcoin bet will probably work better because it’s thinner, more illiquid and has a lot more beta to it.”
Druckenmiller’s change of heart on Bitcoin has got the crypto community very excited. For example, here is Anthony Pompliano (aka “Pomp”), Co-founder at Morgan Creek Digital, tweeting about Druckenmiller’s CNBC interview:
According to a report by CNBC, Druckenmiller said that he is investing in gold and Bitcoin since he believes that both are good ways of hedging against inflation, which he expects will go up during the next few years due to the Fed’s quantitative easing measures.
