This post was originally published at The Humble Dollar
If you're like me, you want to stick with your long-term investment plan, while remaining open to new ideas. It’s a balancing act—to avoid missing a new, long-lasting trend, while not getting caught up in a bubble.
That’s how I feel about cryptocurrencies. Their market cap has swelled to $2.6 trillion. But what does that mean? Contrast that to the value of the global stock and bond markets: Each is about $125 trillion.
To me, it makes sense to have some exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum and the like. A portfolio weighting in proportion to the global investable market of cryptocurrencies amounts to about 1% of assets.
That’s probably not a huge dollar amount for most investors. But I’d argue that anything much above 1% risks becoming an outsized, speculative bet. At the same time, having zero exposure could be seen as being underweight.
Buying crypto directly is expensive. Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) has transaction fees of roughly 1.5%. The new ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (NYSE:BITO) sports a lofty 0.95% expense ratio, along with other risks. But you don’t have to open a Coinbase account to get digital exposure, nor must you purchase a bitcoin exchange-traded fund. There’s another option.
I was intrigued by a list of companies with digital asset exposure put together by Bank of America Global Research. The list of 43 stocks includes many companies we know well including Mastercard (NYSE:MA), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) and, surprisingly, agricultural commodities giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Company (NYSE:ADM). All of them either own cryptocurrencies outright, or have invested in digital assets and the blockchain.
As I see it, owning a basket of crypto-exposed stocks could be a cheaper option than buying cryptocurrencies directly. The downside: It adds more complexity to my portfolio—and it’s yet another investment group I’d have to track.