Fidelity, the largest fund manager with $6T AUM, is taking a different direction. HN won't want to hear this but here it goes: (get your pitchforks ready)
"Fidelity Investments’ new cryptocurrency company will offer trading for institutional customers in a few weeks, Bloomberg reported Monday.
Betting that the cryptocurrency bear market will turn around, Fidelity created its cryptocurrency platform Fidelity Digital Assets in October. The new company began a custody service to securely store bitcoin for its customers in March, CNBC reported. Now, it will be letting customers buy and sell the cryptocurrency in the upcoming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
Fidelity, a roughly 72-year-old family controlled firm, is primarily known for managing retirement plans and mutual funds. But it also spends $2.5 billion per year on technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain.
Forty-seven percent of institutional investors think digital assets are worth investing in, according to a survey released by Fidelity on May 2.
Further, of the 450 institutions interviewed by Fidelity for research for its new company, everyone from wealthy families to hedge funds to pensions, 22% of respondents already owned a cryptocurrency.
Since the bitcoin boom in 2017, the world’s largest cryptocurrency has dropped more than 60% since its high of almost $20,000 at the end of 2017 and was trading near $5,703 on Monday.
Fidelity is only offering the crypto trade to institutional customers. Rivals like Robinhood and E-Trade Financial are taking on retail investors."
The bit about cryptocurrency. Many in the HN community are anti-crypto and with just about as much emotional enthusiasm as an anti-vaxxer. I'm a long time member of HN, before crypto became popular. I've seen the continual rise in negative sentiment. As a veteran software engineer (cutting code since I was a kid in the 80's), there's always been a purist camp that can't quite wrap their head around the financial markets. Dotcommy crypto scams aside, some equate the financial markets with 'badness' or the dark side (wallst = bad). The adoption of crypto is inevitable and unstoppable. I spend my time developing algorithms for financial markets in C, C++ and Python and have yet to see any software engineers in this camp reject crypto. I encourage all to not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Crypto is a great trading vehicle and a great way for a new breed of company to raise capital from a new and truly global capital market.
I'd encourage those that are anit-crypto in the community to adapt. I never wanted to move from real BBSs to Compuserve, but I had to. Never moved to AOL just went straight to geocities which was a mistake but here we are.
I haven't really detected anti crypto, sentiment. Theres many (most?) people who are bearish on crypto, and I would count myself in that number. And when I say bearish I mean Bitcoin won't be worth $Xmillion and be used for some meaningful portion of trade anytime soon.
Actually, I think banks launching their own crypto currencies could be the one of the best chances they've got. I assume the banks have identified valid use cases for them. The ironic thing is they sacrifice the supposed advantage of crypto currencies, which is their decentralisation.
I've been a software engineer for over 15 years. I also got a doctorate and contributed to papers and books about Internet security back in the late '90s. I also manage quite a bit of money. I don't develop financial algorithms, though. I guess I could have at one point had I wanted to. Things like high-frequency trading make me ill, quite frankly. Such trading schemes shouldn't even be legal as there is zero value in sub-microsecond price discovery. It was purely designed to front run legitimate orders and shave pennies off of legitimate transactions. Ghoulish.
I have been watching this crypto currency situation unfold since it began. One of my early observations was that a lot of unsavory Wall Street types flocked into it for one very good reason--they understand that it was not well regulated and there was zero oversight. That allows those Wall Street types to pull off their favorite scam--the pump and dump. It is exceedingly easy to do with cryptos.
What I have also noticed about cryptos is that if you were going to scam Millenials, there is probably no better vehicle to do it with than this pseudo-technical, phony currency that perfectly plays to all their weaknesses, especially their yen to "get out of debt quick" or "get rich quick." For months the headlines were all "Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain!" Another sign of a scam is using technical jargon to program people--blockchain==I get rich. Just repeat it over and over and nobody even questions where that idea came from. Something from nothing--the age old scam! Just buy at "the right time" and watch the money flow in. But can millions of people really all become rich simply by buying unproven currency type vehicles? Based on my experience, no!
But this is 2019 and you're welcome to believe whatever you want. As for me, I'm avoiding this crap like the plague and I am pretty disappointed that legitimate firms like Fidelity are getting involved with something so unproven and so subject to manipulation. It's like they just can't help themselves.
This all reminds me of the dotcom era when all you had to do was buy stock in pets.com or anything.com and watch it go through the roof...for a time.
The essence of a great scam--at first, you have the dream and they have the money and in the end, it is you with the money and their dream is dead on the floor with seemingly no one to blame but their own greed. It will be same with crypto, it might just take a little longer due to the sheer magnitude of the scam.
> HN won't want to hear this but here it goes: (get your pitchforks ready)
It seems like welcome news to passive index fund investors.
Fidelity is offering zero expense ratio index funds, as well as some really low cost funds. The money to run those funds is coming from Fidelity customers who are focused on throwing their money away on other products.
> Forty-seven percent of institutional investors think digital assets are worth investing in
