CNBC contributor Karen Finerman says she expects more hedge funds to buy Bitcoin (BTC) after big news broke that one of the most successful hedge fund managers on Wall Street, Paul Tudor Jones, is investing in the leading cryptocurrency.
On a new episode of Fast Money, Finerman says the move is a key step in convincing investors with large amounts of capital to take a closer look at cryptocurrency.
“Nobody wants to get outed having owned Bitcoin if it completely falls apart. But if you can say Paul Tudor Jones owns it also, maybe that gives you a little bit of cover…
If this isn’t the environment for Bitcoin to work with this kind of money printing all around the world, then I don’t know what is. So we’ll see. If inflation ever ticks up, I’m optimistic that Bitcoin will go up as well.”
Fellow analyst Brian Kelly says Jones’s stamp of approval for Bitcoin (BTC) is shaking the crypto industry and shining a light on BTC’s similarities to gold.
“When you look back at the world in the 70s, that’s when gold was no longer pegged, so that was kind of the first real speculative market that you have. And that’s a lot like what Bitcoin is right now. You didn’t have all the derivatives; you didn’t have the options; you didn’t have the ETFs that might tamp down that volatility. That’s the same case here in Bitcoin.”
Kelly says he believes BTC has the edge over the precious metal, with more potential rewards on the horizon and more mobility overall.
“We’ve seen the issues we’ve had over the last weeks where gold prices disengaged from futures spot gold because they couldn’t get gold bars from London to New York to sell. You don’t have that issue with Bitcoin. This is internet money. You just send it right over it and settle it.”