Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, also known as Mr Wonderful, is willing to place 5% of his investment portfolio in the U.S. approved bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) Commission for Securities and Exchange (SEC). O’Leary, long regarded as a sceptic of bitcoin, is concerned about the uncertainty of bitcoin and needs regulators to be comfortable with it before he joins in.
Kevin O’Leary wishes to invest in the ETF of Bitcoin
In a podcast hosted by Morgan Creek Digital partner Anthony Pompliano, Canadian investor and television personality Kevin O’Leary addressed his perspective on bitcoin last week.
O’Leary was a sceptic about Bitcoin. In May last year, he told CNBC that bitcoin was “worthless” and a useless currency,” adding that to him, “it’s garbage because in large quantities you can’t get in and out of it.”
The Shark Tank star said he is not against bitcoin, but he still has the same concerns. “I do own a small amount of bitcoin,” he said, but only because a class he taught at Harvard University challenged him to get interested in cryptocurrencies.
He is concerned, however, about the instability of bitcoin and the adverse reaction of regulators to it. He showed this concerns by stating that, “Every time I talk off the record to the regulators, because I talk to them all the time for various reasons, they’re a little squeamish on bitcoin, they are not quite there yet,”
O’Leary said that, “When I can get this thing regulated so that I can put millions of dollars into it and know that I’m not off the side in any way. I’m not breaching anything … and it would be stable,” he insisted that,” If that was the case if tomorrow morning we woke up. The SEC said you could create an ETF with bitcoin, and we think bitcoin is legitimate, you know, payment system and store of wealth, not only would it go up but you’d have a lot of people like me investing in it.”
He explained that if that occurs “I’d say okay I’m going to give it a 5% weighting so you know I don’t want a significant portion of my portfolio having that amount of volatility.” He made it clear that his investment of choice is with ETF, and a majority of his assets are there.
As an investor who has faith in branching out, O’Leary repeated that it troubles him “a little bit” that “in the crypto space you have to be very concentrated to get these returns in one cryptocurrency, bitcoin.”
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