Autonomous Next chaired an event in Dallas and mentioned a few key takeaways. Below is their commentary.
First, something that really stuck out was the audience itself. We informally surveyed about 150 attendees, of whom 50% were financial advisors allocating assets for retail and HNW investors. Further, 70% of the audience owned bitcoin, 50% owned ETH, and about 15% participated in an ICO directly. Two people, not including Lex, had the unfortunate pleasure of buying Crypto Kitties. The largest financial advisor in the United States, Ric Edelman, who runs $200 billion across 85,000 clients, stayed with us for the full agenda. Just a year ago, the overlap between the wealth management and crypto communities would be a null set.
On the fund manager side, we had Tuur Demeester from Adamant, Sean Keegan of Digital Asset Strategies, Kyle Samani of Multicoin, Mat Hougan of Bitwise, and Bart Stephens of Blockchain Capital. We were impressed by the very variety of investment strategies on display. For example, Tuur primarily runs a Bitcoin investment strategy, using leverage on/off BTC to amplify alpha. Similarly, the custodian Xapo only custodies BTC, backed by a reserve of coins — $10 million worth bought in 2014. Others run index funds — with Bitwise creating passive indexes and Digital Asset Strategies trying to deliver smart beta on the same baskets. And of course, Multicoin and Blockchain Capital both take fundamental venture-style bets on direct projects. We were reminded again of the BCAP token offering, a security token that Blockchain Capital launched as a unit in its fund.
We can’t do justice to all the conversations (i.e., custody, regulation, markets), but another one that stuck out for us was an asset allocator panel. Paul Pagnato of PagnatoKarp, a wealth advisor to large family offices, sees crypto living inside the venture capital allocation slice. James McDonald of Vishnu Wealth Management talked about building a 10-15 coin basket with the largest liquidity, while protecting for downside exposure. And we’ll end on the perspective of Tyrone Ross Jr., who never wanted to put his clients into crypto assets. Instead, his clients just started disclosing to him their over-exposure to digital holdings — so he had to design hedges and diversification strategies that would balance out the idiosyncratic risk. He also had to start reading white papers and websites to figure out what his clients were talking about. Advisors with such an appetite will retain their client relationships, while those like Nouriel Roubini will be drowned out by the winds of time.