On Monday (November 16), billionaire investor Mike Novogratz made a bold price prediction for Bitcoin.
Former hedge fund manager Novogratz is the Founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, “a diversified financial services and investment management innovator in the digital asset, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology sector.”
Last week, during an interview with Alex Saunders in episode E734 of the “Nugget’s News” crypto podcast, Novogratz talked about how he first got into crypto, and how much he paid for one bitcoin back then:
“I got a call from a friend of mine. He asked me about Bitcoin, and I had never heard of it. He had moved out to the west coast — everyone was talking about Bitcoin — and so, I did 15 minutes of research, and was like ‘ah cool tech technology, libertarians like it’…
“This was in 2012. We’re in the European financial crisis. The Chinese were buying … so my first buys of Bitcoin were at about $95, and they were very speculative. I bought it because I thought it would go up.
“And as I started looking at it, digging in, I thought this could be cool. So, I called a friend of mine — Dan Moorhead from Pantera [Capital] — whom I had invested with when he ran a macro fund a few years earlier. I helped seed his macro fund…
“I said ‘Morehead, take a look at this; I don’t have enough time.’ And after two weeks, he called me back, and said ‘Dude, this is going to change the world’… So we decided — Pete Briger, my other partner, myself, and Dan — that we would buy a bunch of Bitcoin and to Dan’s credit he bought a lot. We were a lot richer than Dan at the time, and so he bought a lot of Bitcoin — about thirty thousand bitcoin — for himself, and so we’re like ‘I’ll have $30,001’ because we couldn’t let him have more than we had; so we roughly all about the same.
Well, yesterday, after Game of Thrones actress Maisie Williams ran a Twitter poll to ask her 2.7 million followers if she should become a Bitcoiner, Novogratz told her that she should and explained why:
His second tweet is quite interesting because it also reveals that he bought more Bitcoin as recently as Sunday (November 15) at a price of $15,800 per bitcoin. According to the tweet below, it seems that Novogratz also invested in Ether (ETH) on November 15 and that he is bullish on both:
It is worth pointing out that in last week’s interview with Alex Saunders, Novogrtz also revealed that around the end of 2015, he bought his first 500,000 ETH from Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin:
“Ether was trading [at] about 95 cents. It wasn’t easy to buy back then… So my first ether I actually bought from Vitalik.
“I called called him up. I met him once at a dinner. H didn’t remember me, didn’t know me, but they thought it was good for the community to have a Wall Street guy buying.
“So, I bought a half a million ether at 99 cents, or 98 cents; he changed the price at last minute from $0.98 to $0.99. I had waited too long, and the price was going up… And then, I really became much more of a crypto maniac.”
Since Sunday, Novogratz’s latest investment in Bitcoin has already gone up 5.77% because, according to CryptoCompare, currently (as of 08:52 UTC on November 17), Bitcoin is trading at $16,712, up 3% vs USD in the past 24-hour period:
Another interesting bit of news from yesterday is that CI Global Asset Management (“CI GAM”) and Galaxy Digital Capital Management L.P. (“Galaxy Digital”) announced that “CI GAM has filed and obtained a receipt for a preliminary prospectus for the initial public offering of CI Galaxy Bitcoin Fund (the “Fund”).”
The CI Galaxy Bitcoin Fund is “a closed-end investment fund which seeks to provide unitholders with exposure to bitcoin through an institutional-quality fund platform.” It will “invest directly in bitcoin with the Fund’s holdings of bitcoin priced using the Bloomberg Galaxy Bitcoin Index (the “BTC”), which is designed to measure the performance of a single bitcoin traded in U.S. dollars.” The Bitcoin will be “owned and administered by Bloomberg Index Services Ltd.”
