Barclays Private Bank chief market strategist says bitcoin is 'almost uninvestable'

Bitcoin’s bull run peak of nearly $40,000 caught the attention of many institutional investors — but Barclays Private Bank chief market strategist Gerald Moser doesn’t seem impressed. 

“While it is nigh on impossible to forecast an expected return for bitcoin, its volatility makes the asset almost 'uninvestable' from a portfolio perspective,” Moser told Financial News

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Moser adds that the volatility seen in bitcoin mimics the behavior of other risk assets like oil. “Many would probably throw the cryptocurrency out of any portfolio in a typical mean-variance optimization.”

“The performance of the cryptocurrency has been mostly driven by retail investors joining a seemingly unsustainable rally rather than institutional money investing on a long-term basis,” Moser said.

Barclays, a large-scale financial service firm in the U.K., had previously shown interest in cryptocurrency and digital asset technology. 

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.