Ark Investment Management CEO Cathie Wood says institutional investors support her bullish thesis of bitcoin reaching $500,000 in the next five years.
Speaking Wednesday afternoon during an interview on Barron’s, MarketWatch’s sister publication, Wood said that if “institutional investors move into bitcoin and allocate 5% of their portfolios,” the value of a bitcoin would rise to around $560,000 by 2026, based on current levels, according to ARK’s estimates.
After tipping lower in May, and then pulling back from record levels achieved just last week, bitcoin prices
BTCUSD,
stand at around $60,000 on Wednesday, according to CoinDesk.
The ARK Investment CEO said that the transparency of the bitcoin blockchain network allows users to see that institutional purchases play out almost in real time.
“We can tell it’s happening because of on-chain analytics,” she said, noting that the unique addresses associated with crypto users of any distributed ledger make it easy to see money change hands.
Wood said that institutions may be convinced to invest in bitcoin because of its low correlation between crypto such as bitcoin and Ether on the Ethereum network and other assets like stocks.
“The correlation is very low,” said Wood and if there is a low correlation of returns by investing in crypto “you will be raising returns and lowering risk over time,” she said, citing a Cambridge Associates report that made the case for bitcoin as a non-correlated investment.
The fund manager said she, however, has been surprised by the move by companies, such as Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
Square Inc.
SQ,
MicroStrategy
MSTR,
and Coinbase Global
COIN,
to diversify the cash portion of their balance sheets with bitcoin.
Wood is a money manager, whose funds focus on making investments in disruptive innovations and manages the flagship $20.7 billion ARK Innovation ETF
ARKK,
ARK Innovation had been a highflier in 2021 until a rotation out of growth investments helped to pummel her fund which is down 6% so far in 2021.
By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
was up 17% in the year to date, the S&P 500 index
SPX,
was rising nearly 25%, the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP,
was up nearly 24%.
