Jan Van Eck, the chief executive of Van Eck Associated and the man behind two well-known gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs), has recently argued cryptocurrency investors are now turning their attention to gold, leaving bitcoin and others behind.
According to Van Eck, signs show BTC investors are now focusing on the traditional commodity. Speaking at CNBC’s “ETF Edge” program this week, he noted that BTC managed to pull “a little bit of demand away from gold” in 2017, but added that data showed things are changing:
Interestingly, we just polled 4,000 bitcoin investors and their number one investment for 2019 is actually gold. So gold lost to bitcoin and now it’s going the other way.
In 2017, CryptoCompare data shows bitcoin’s price skyrocketed from little over $1,000 to a near $20,000 all-time high, before its price started correcting. In 2017, gold went p by about 4%, and last year it rose 2.5% while BTC dropped a whopping 82%, to currently trade at $3,550.
The founder and chief investment officer at Seymour Asset Management, Tim Seymour, also during the “ETF Edge” show, noted that it may be hard for bitcoin to turn the tide at this point. This because of the liquidity it lost, and because it’s “been very difficult to argue store of value which is really what we started hearing about.”
Per Seymour, gold is “a store of value and there’s no disputing that.” Van Eck’s gold ETF, the GDX gold miners ETF and the GDXJ junior gold miners ETF, have been doing well in the past few months, as they’re “starting to zig when the stock market zags.”
Notably, while the S&P 500 dropped 14% in the fourth quarter of last year, the GDX ETF rallied 14%, a trend that changed this year, with GDX rising less than 1% and the S&P 500 rising 6%. So far this year, bitcoin has been underperforming both.
The flagship cryptocurrency entered the new year at about $3,700, and after reaching a $4,100 high started falling due to successive sell-offs. Despite its price action, it didn’t go below the $3,500 mark. The VanEck-SolidX bitcoin EFT proposal, as CryptoGlobe covered, has recently been withdrawn.
