Monday, July 15, 2019

The growth of alternative asset management into Crypto

Alternative Assets are growing strong.  Perhaps it is part of the reason why Bitcoin was so popular with investors.  The amount of places you can get good returns on your money are dwindling.  They are there – it’s just that they are changing.  Traditional markets may return enough just to stay ahead of inflation – but they also bear the risk of losing.  So in the long run, traditional investing is a net loss in the opinion of many investors.

There has been hesitation among traditional asset managers to add Crypto to their portfolio.  However,there are a growing number of Crypto only asset managers that offer Crypto friendly features like pseudo-anonymity, like AMFEIX.   Some will argue about the differences between these managers & funds vs. the traditional asset classes, but it’s not about a compare and contrast.  It’s about evolution.  Capitalism at its core is about evolution.

Capitalism knows no boundaries, it knows no countries, no loyalty.  It only knows that it has to evolve in order to survive.  Crypto is an interesting question because of the regulation involved.  Basically, being pseudo-anonymous is not always a good thing.  Because Crypto is unregulated (or to say differently, is not controlled by a government regulator) it provides the possibility for fraud.  Just have a look at what President Trump has to say about Crypto:

This is actually a positive comment for Crypto, because there are a number of new stable coins that use the US Dollar as a management reserve.  Crypto has a bad reputation due to Bitcoin, but Crypto is much more than Bitcoin, as we have seen recently in the markets.

Managing money is not easy.  The Barclay Hedge Index is roughly flat or slightly negative in the past years.  There are many fallacies of alternative investments, as explained on Zero Hedge:

Just because something is ‘different’ doesn’t make it ‘better’ – just because something is not mainstream doesn’t make it ‘honest.’  We all here agree that mainstream investing sucks, but do we use the same rational methodology when evaluating alternatives?  Crypto has proven this is not the case.  Investors lost their minds and did all the things they have been told not to do over the years.

Managers are exploring more markets – and one of those is Crypto.  While Crypto is not an asset class per se, it can be.  Crypto broadens the horizons of the manager, so that there are more markets to trade.  And Crypto sure is volatile!  That’s risky, but it’s also potentially profitable.

Also there’s a growing number of Crypto millionaires that simply feel more comfortable investing in the market where they made their money.

While the traditional fund management industry is dying – another one is being born.  Just like Bitcoin came out of no where, new fund managers and strategies are going to dominate the next decade.  Traditional funds like FX Concepts and others, have been closed. 

Global Intel Hub is going to keep an eye out on emerging managers in the Crypto space.