On 26 January 2019, Jan Van Eck, CEO of Van Eck Associates, which is an investment management firm based in New York, said in an interview with CNBC that Bitcoin (BTC) investors have moved to investing in gold instead. The claim was based on a poll carried out by the firm, asking BTC investors their top investment for 2019. The results showed that majority of the investors chose gold as their number one choice.
Van Eck stated that BTC managed to pull demand away from traditional gold in the year 2017, which is when BTC was at its peak. However, gold is now currently starting to overtake BTC as a choice of investments.
Van Eck Associates is renowned for its creation of some of the most popular gold ETFs (exchange-traded funds) such as the GDX Gold Miners ETF and the GDXJ Junior Gold Miners ETF. The CEO stated that these assets have been performing great over the course of the last few months, and seemed to be opposites with the stock market, where the shares would go up when the stock market declines and vice versa.
It is worth noting that VanEck, alongside financial services company SolidX, backed a rule change request proposed by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The proposal, although withdrawn later, was meant to request the permission of the SEC to list CBOE’s Bitcoin ETF.
While discussing the topic of Bitcoin ETFs in the interview, Tim Seymour, who is the founder and chief investment officer of Seymour Asset Management, questioned the capability of BTC to function as a store of value. He said that the cryptocurrency’s store of value potential was always brought to discussions and arguments. Additionally, the utilisation of the digital currency would also decrease the overall liquidity of the economy. He further added that gold’s function as a store of value is concrete unlike BTC.
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