Bitcoin: all or nothing

The bitcoin price has the potential to be worth a lot — or it can tank to zero, says Bill Miller, the founder of Miller Value Partners in Baltimore, Maryland. “I like bitcoin because it’s not correlated with [the stock market],” Miller told CNBC (video below). “It does have the potential to be worth a lot, and the potential to be worth zero.”

Miller claims he’s a bitcoin observer, not a bull. But he has an interesting history with the flagship virtual currency. In December 2017, Miller made headlines in when he invested $1 billion of his firm’s assets in BTC at the height of the market. Miller also invested 1% of his personal net worth (which is undisclosed) in bitcoin, as CCN reported. He has apparently scaled back his firm’s allocation to BTC in the wake of the prolonged bear market.

However, he calls the original cryptocurrency an “interesting technological experiment” that investors should not cavalierly dismiss. Bill Miller said the one thing he likes about bitcoin is that its performance is uncorrelated to the broader stock market. This makes them a good investment during down markets, he said.

“Bitcoin basically has no statistical correlation with stocks or bonds, which makes it an excellent diversifier,” Miller reasoned. Bitcoin peaked in December of last year. And the stock market peaked in January [2018]. It went down for four or five weeks, and then rallied through September 2018. All that time, bitcoin was going down, so the correlation there was negative.