Former Wall Street stockbroker Jordan Belfort, whose life story inspired Martin Scorsese’s legendary film, “Wolf of Wall Street,” told Yahoo Finance that investment in Bitcoin should be seen as a long-term hedge against inflation.
Long-Term Investment
After being convicted of financial crime, Belfort is now a public speaker, author, and sales coach.
Belford said that investors should look long-term and not at a shorter 12 or 24-month horizon when investing in Bitcoin.
"If you take a three-year or five-year horizon, I would be shocked if you didn't make money.[...] With reasonable luck, I think if you take a 24-month horizon, you'll almost certainly make money," he said on the Crypto Mile show. Belfort’s comments come after Bitcoin prices plummet below US$20,000 into values not seen since 2017. Bitcoin now stands at $19,110, down over 10% in the last seven days. However, Belfort believes that the underlying fundamentals of Bitcoin are strong.
"It has a limited supply, and as inflation keeps going and going, there will come a time when Bitcoin will start to trade more like a store of value and less like a growth stock." Once a long-term crypto critic, Belfort is currently an investor in several cryptocurrency-related companies, such as the wallet and NFT startup Squirrel Technologies.
Focus on Utility
Apart from a long-term investment like Bitcoin, Belfort also highlights the investments in ultra-low market cap crypto projects that can potentially make massive profits in the future.
The best way to invest in these projects is early while they are still offered on a launchpad (often referred to as IDO platforms) before they are publicly traded on exchanges. However, Belfort warns “that most of the time you will lose and be prepared to lose it all.”
In the interview, he advises investors to pay close attention to the utility of the crypto project, saying that the best test for a blockchain project is “if the idea works better from a centralized server, I would probably not get involved.”
Another piece of advice is to focus on the management team behind crypto protocols. Belfort stresses that “if you don’t know who the owners are of a protocol, then that is a big concern for me.”
