Comments by "Magic Beans" (@Magic_beans_) on "CNBC Television" channel.

  1. I agree, that happens with any asset. A company or a sector has a great quarter and then people buy in. But also Belshe didn't really answer the question. The host was asking how we should regard crypto: as a commodity, a currency, a collectible, intellectual property? It's kind of a softball question, an opportunity for Belshe to refute the notion that Bitcoin's price is based on nothing but hype. Instead he stammered about how much the line has gone up, only really saying anything meaningful at the end when he mentioned the fixed supply.
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  2. Why wouldn't it track the asset price? That's how it works for other commodity funds. Only rarely and briefly does GLD get more than 1% off its net asset value. This happens pretty much on its own; if the price varies too much from the underlying, some investment analyst notices and buys or sells until that gap disappears. With heavily traded funds there are people and algorithms that'll intervene if there's even a nickel of profit to be made. In fact, these ETFs should track BTC better than prior solutions. because they hold exactly one asset: Bitcoin. Prior solutions like GBTC before this change or BITW (a top-10-coin index) used futures and swaps as a proxy for holding Bitcoin. Why buy a fund at all? - For someone who keeps their own wallet and doesn't trade often, no reason. In fact it may be preferable because you're cutting out intermediaries. - For someone who's been keeping their coins on an exchange, trust. If I held BITB (or any of the others) in a Schwab account and Schwab collapsed tomorrow, the SIPC would ensure that my BITB holdings get transferred to another brokerage. Compare that with FTX, where as far as we know the money's just gone. - For those who do trade regularly, cost. Even on day 1 of these funds, the spread was about 0.5%. Over time I'd expect that to drop to 0.1% or less for trades (on blue-chip stocks the spread is usually a penny or less per share). That plus 0.25% per year is cheaper than Coinbase in many cases*. - Probably the biggest reason is retirement accounts. Workplace retirement plans (about $7 trillion total) generally haven't had a mechanism by which employees could hold crypto, and now they do. * Don't worry too much about Coinbase; as long as their fees are denominated in crypto, anything that's good for the currencies is good for them.
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  3. They'd have to pay the taxes eventually. May as well start now and spread the sales out over a few years.
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  4. That's why (almost) all these funds have been slashing their fees, and in many cases waiving fees for the fund's first few months. They know that investors will veer toward the least expensive funds. That means more transactions flowing through those funds, which means smaller spreads, which will continue to attract users, until two or three funds dominate.
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