Earlier this week, in an interview with Yahoo Finance, Catherine Wood, Founder, CIO, and CEO at ARK Investment Management, LLC (aka “ARK” or “ARK Invest”), talked about the Bitcoin.
Wood started by saying that ARK Invest was not shocked by institutional investors’ move into crypto:
“We have been expecting institutions to start moving into Bitcoin and other cryptoassets, but primarily Bitcoin, the most secure of the blockchains, because if you look at the correlation of Bitcoin’s performance relative to any other asset class, it has the lowest correlation, meaning if you buy some Bitcoin, you will further diversify your portfolio and increase your returns with lower risk...
“Institutions look for that low correlation. Bitcoin has it. That’s clear. We have 10 years of history now.”
What did surprise her though was the actions of two companies: MicroStrategy and MassMutual.
With regard to MicroStrategy, she said:
“What surprised me and us generally was to watch MicroStrategy, which has put all the cash on its balance sheet into Bitcoin and even did another equity offering so it could put more cash on its balance sheet. I think that’s a little crazy because I think the regulators will have something to say about this… Is this company the MicroStrategy technology company or is it like an ETF?“
As for MassMutual, which made the most surprising move, she had this to say:
It put $100 million into its general account. Now, its general account is enormous. So a hundred million dollars is something like .001 but what that move told us is MassMutual is very conservative and very highly regulated and so it had to jump through many more regulatory hurdles than I thought would have been possible by now, and so I think that it is a seal of approval.”
Later, she talked about what makes Bitcoin stand out for her:
“Bitcoin is… roughly a six hundred billion dollar market cap, so not even half the size of Apple or Amazon. Put it into perspective. And yet it has a very big idea. I think a much bigger idea than Apple or Amazon. It’s the first global truly global digital currency out there, and it is completely decentralized. There’s no throat to choke.“
