CNBC is spotlighting a video clip from wealth manager Peter Mallouk, certified financial planner and president of wealth management firm Creative Planning, who cautions young people to stay away from Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
The CNBC Make It clip, tweeted to 42,000 followers, shows Mallouk making a case against Bitcoin as a sound investment or as a means of building wealth.
“There’s still a diehard cryptocurrency crowd out there and they point to the blockchain technology that backs it, and while that blockchain technology is real and you’ve got big companies like IBM and Accenture and others investing in it, that doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is going to work out or Ripple’s going to work out.
The TV worked out, but everything that comes out of it, we don’t want to watch. Palm and Blackberry were fantastic but Apple came in and took them out. Lycos and Excite were here before Google. So what we’re going to see most likely is we’re going to see cryptocurrencies collapse. There’s thousands of them. There’s no way that even a fraction of them can survive. Is it possible that maybe one or two will work out in the future? Sure it is. In the meantime, you get no income. It’s not a real investment. It’s speculation.
This isn’t the way for a young person to try to put the building blocks together to build wealth. If you like the technology behind cryptocurrency, the blockchain technology, there are ways to invest in that. There are companies that are very heavily investing in blockchain and you can buy those companies. Companies like IBM and Accenture investing in blockchain technology. Companies like Walmart are using it to develop ways to run their inventory. That’s the way to play blockchain technology â not by trying to buy cryptocurrencies that you hope replace regular currency in the future.”
Donât buy bitcoin, warns wealth manager: Weâre likely âgoing to see cryptocurrencies collapse.' More: https://t.co/10K5k9NJXJ pic.twitter.com/UECjKBcehM
— CNBC Make It (@CNBCMakeIt) October 4, 2019
When the video was first published on April 3rd, CNBC noted,
“The price of bitcoin surged more than 15 percent Tuesday and briefly crossed the $5,000 mark for the first time since mid-November. Itâs still well below the all-time high it hit in December 2017 of near $20,000.”
Now trading around $8,120, Bitcoin is up 62.4% since April.
Blue chip stock IBM, which closed at $142.99 on Friday, has remained comparatively flat since early April when it was trading for $143.63. Over a five-year period, IBM’s stock has declined roughly 22.7%, down from $185 on October 10, 2014.
Bitcoin, which is increasingly regarded as a store of value, economic troubles and geopolitical tensions, is up 2,126.56% for the same period, up from $364.69 on October 14, 2014, according to data compiled by CoinMarketCap.