SkyBridge's Scaramucci puts $100,000 price target on Bitcoin, sees more money managers and CFOs adopting it
Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of $9.2 billion fund-of-funds SkyBridge Capital, says Bitcoin could “easily trade” at $100,000 per coin in the next 12 months.
In January, SkyBridge, which provides a conduit for the mass affluent and registered investment advisors (RIAs) to invest in the hard-to-reach asset class of hedge funds, launched its Bitcoin Fund L.P. with $25 million of its own capital. The fund has a minimum subscription size of $50,000 and charges an annual fee of 75 basis points.
Scaramucci told Yahoo Finance Live on Wednesday that the SkyBridge Bitcoin fund is “heading towards $100 million” in assets under management.
Scaramucci advised that investor put the size and scale of money they don’t need in the short-term in Bitcoin, which he thinks has “a very big future.”
Scaramucci, who started out as a Bitcoin skeptic before becoming an investor, though not an evangelist, said his message to other money managers is that he believes their performance will be benched off of Bitcoin.
“You're going to be benchmarked off of Bitcoin, meaning in your mosaic of stocks and bonds and alternatives and gold, there'll be a few percentage points related to digital currency. And since Bitcoin is the winner of that battle, it'll likely be Bitcoin. So if you're not going to be an investor in Bitcoin you're effectively short Bitcoin,” Scaramucci added.
SkyBridge decided in October to put several hundred million dollars into Bitcoin across its product line. The firm now has just under $500 million in Bitcoin across its investments.
According to Scaramucci, the digital asset has lifted his fund-of-funds’ performance since the depths of the coronavirus pandemic.
“My performance was smashed last year last March as a result of the pandemic. The SkyBridge Series G fund is up 33% since April 1, and some of that frankly has been the move in Bitcoin that we took advantage of in the fourth quarter of last year,” he added.
While Scaramucci is pleased with the progress his firm has made on its Bitcoin fund, he cautioned that it’s a volatile asset.
“Some of what you're seeing this week is [a] short squeeze, very akin to what would have happened to Tesla, where the non-believers in Tesla were [squeezed] out of their shorts, [the] same thing sort of happening here to Bitcoin,” he said.
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) has surged more than 57% since the beginning of the year. This week, Bitcoin reached record highs of $48,200 after Tesla (TSLA) revealed it bought $1.5 billion worth of the digital currency and that it plans to start accepting bitcoin as payment in the “near future.”
Scaramucci echoed comments given to Yahoo Finance earlier on Wednesday by Michael Saylor, the CEO of business intelligence software company MicroStrategy (MSTR), the first publicly traded company to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet. He thinks more companies will add Bitcoin to their balance sheets amid a macroeconomic backdrop of money printing. What’s more, he argues, Bitcoin is “robustly scaling pursuant to Metcalfe’s Law.”
“I think that's the dilemma for CFOs right now is they're watching this dollar production, this proliferation of dollars, they're saying to themselves, ‘OK, maybe I need to have some of this.’ It's very fungible. It trades in a liquid manner. It trades in a millisecond. And it is scaling over 100 million people are using Bitcoin today, very likely that a billion people will be using it in five years,” Scaramucci said.
Julia La Roche is a correspondent for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter.