Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily Bloomberg I Heard podcast,
Speaker 1: and I'm Stacy Marie Ishmael, Managing editor of Crypto for
Speaker 1: Bloomberg News. It's Monday, September six. For investors trying to
Speaker 1: get exposure to crypto, there's many different options available these days.
Speaker 1: Products like crypto ETFs or exchange traded funds are one
Speaker 1: of the more popular alternatives to owning tokens directly. But
Speaker 1: what exactly are crypto ETFs and how do they work?
Speaker 1: And what does it mean that many of the products
Speaker 1: pitched as ways to diversify your crypto portfolio are performing
Speaker 1: pretty similarly to each other. In the studio today, to
Speaker 1: tackle these questions, we have Bloomberg Report to Katie Kreifeld Money.
Speaker 1: Actually look under the hood and see these are all
Speaker 1: holding what the same toolve come beanies, They're all trading
Speaker 1: in the exact same direction. Casey, welcome back. Thanks for
Speaker 1: having me tell our folks who you are and what
Speaker 1: you do. I'm Katie Greifeld. I cover markets and exchange
Speaker 1: traded funds at Bloomberg. That seems busy. It is busy.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of markets. I also really like crypto
Speaker 1: so I try to do as much of it as
Speaker 1: I can. And then you have this whole thing about
Speaker 1: e t F s. Yes, so e t F s
Speaker 1: they're exchanged treated funds. It's a basket of securities that
Speaker 1: basically you can trade intra day like a stock, similar
Speaker 1: to a stock. You can buy them and sell them
Speaker 1: on your brokerage platforms. But it's actually again an entire
Speaker 1: portfolio of companies. So what's an example in crypto of
Speaker 1: a kind of a popular e t F. And why
Speaker 1: are folks, you know, if if I'm interested in getting
Speaker 1: exposure to crypto, why wouldn't I just buy bitcoin? It's
Speaker 1: a great question. The most popular e t F and
Speaker 1: crypto is actually not in e t F, but it
Speaker 1: would love to be. We're talking about the Gray Skill
Speaker 1: Bitcoin Trust. You can buy and sell it intra day.
Speaker 1: It holds physically back to bitcoin, but it's a trust.
Speaker 1: It's not an e t F. You do have crypto
Speaker 1: e t F physically back to crypto et F that
Speaker 1: actually hold bitcoin and other coins in Canada, in Europe,
Speaker 1: but the U s SEC has not allowed that structure.
Speaker 1: In the United States, the SEC rejected Gray Scales application
Speaker 1: to convert it's thirteen billion dollar bitcoin trust and to
Speaker 1: physically back to e t F. And within the hour
Speaker 1: the digital asset manager announced it would suit the regulator.
Speaker 1: And if anybody is interested in catching up on why
Speaker 1: that is, we have multiple episodes that you can you
Speaker 1: can check out a ton of reporting from from Katie.
Speaker 1: But okay, so you know there's these crypto ecfs, they exist.
Speaker 1: What problem do they solve for investors compared to holding
Speaker 1: the actual spot bitcoin or anything else. Well, if you're
Speaker 1: a retail trader, you might not want to set up
Speaker 1: a digital wallet, for example, the concept of oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I could lose my password or my keys and just
Speaker 1: never have access again, that's real. Maybe you don't want
Speaker 1: to use coin base. You've heard a lot about the
Speaker 1: fees for example, or something similar. And if you're a
Speaker 1: professional trader, professional money manager, and institutional trader, it might
Speaker 1: not be in your mandate. You might not be allowed
Speaker 1: to actually physically hold. So somebody in a compliance department
Speaker 1: is like, nope, yes, yes, But then you can say, oh,
Speaker 1: but this is in e t F. This is fine,
Speaker 1: this is under the oversight of the SEC. What kinds
Speaker 1: of stuff exists in E t F? S when it
Speaker 1: comes to crypto. So because the US has this regulatory
Speaker 1: structure that isn't like Europe, that isn't like Canada, and
Speaker 1: you can't actually hold bitcoin in an e t F
Speaker 1: in the US, you've seen this weird sort of frank
Speaker 1: and fund industry pop up. You have a lot of
Speaker 1: crypto ish e t F their equity e t F
Speaker 1: that exists in the U s and they truck companies
Speaker 1: that are related to crypto somehow, think MicroStrategy, which owns
Speaker 1: a lot of bitcoin but isn't actually bitcoin. And then
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of miners for example, and I
Speaker 1: mean e t F issuers. The saying in e t
Speaker 1: S is that there's an e t F for everything,
Speaker 1: but there actually isn't an e t F for crypto.
Speaker 1: But issuers are trying. They've launched e t f s
Speaker 1: that claim to track everything from the metavers to miners
Speaker 1: to n f t s, but if you look under
Speaker 1: the hood, they actually all just hold the same sort
Speaker 1: of companies as Asset manager pro Shares is poised to
Speaker 1: launch the first bitcoin futures e t F battle trade
Speaker 1: under the symbol b I t O. It'll investor people
Speaker 1: are like Yeah, prices canna only go up from here.
Speaker 1: What's the kind of stuff that's in that e t F?
Speaker 1: So bits, so I'm gonna go with bid. Oh. So
Speaker 1: that is a bitcoin futures e t F, and that
Speaker 1: is a very important sticking point for both the e
Speaker 1: t F and the crypto industry because futures are not
Speaker 1: the actual underlying assets. Well, you're almost guaranteed to find
Speaker 1: your self trading at another level than the spot price
Speaker 1: right after a few weeks, months, certainly after a year,
Speaker 1: there is some tracking error there, it hasn't been as
Speaker 1: dramatic as maybe feared. And then if you think about
Speaker 1: the crypto ish e t F is one of the
Speaker 1: biggest out there is the amplified Transford Transformational data sharing
Speaker 1: e t F to tickers, b l okay so block
Speaker 1: block a nod to the blockchain. Again, they all really
Speaker 1: hold sort of the same thing. You probably look at
Speaker 1: that you see a meta again not specific to block
Speaker 1: but sort of this entire industry. It's probably meta PayPal square,
Speaker 1: all of the different miners, UH and micro strategy, and
Speaker 1: if you look at the correlations between these, it's almost perfect.
Speaker 1: It's basically point nine, which is extremely, extremely high point
Speaker 1: nine as in one would be literally anything that happens,
Speaker 1: they all take exactly the same direction. So point nine
Speaker 1: point nine is very very high, and it's a result
Speaker 1: of exactly what you're saying. It's like, Okay, let's say
Speaker 1: there's twelve things going in E t F everybody's slicing
Speaker 1: those twelve things in a slightly different way. Um, that
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like a good set of options for somebody
Speaker 1: who's trying to look at these as a way to
Speaker 1: diversify their portfolios. Exactly. You could see a retail trader,
Speaker 1: for example, who E t f s are very popular with.
Speaker 1: They provide access to markets that a normal individual trader
Speaker 1: might not be able to get access too. So if
Speaker 1: you're trying to create a portfolio that captures all these
Speaker 1: different themes within the crypto universe, and you're trying to
Speaker 1: do that through E t F s, it's pretty much impossible.
Speaker 1: Again when you actually look under the hood and see
Speaker 1: these are all holding what the same twelve companies, They're
Speaker 1: all trading in the exact same direction. There are so
Speaker 1: many follow up questions I have, but I will start
Speaker 1: with the bitter sibling by the I know so same issuer,
Speaker 1: but is presented as a way to take a position
Speaker 1: on the market going down. How does that work exactly?
Speaker 1: So that's another of these bitcoin derivatives tracking funds. This
Speaker 1: will actually shorts the future. So it's the exact opposite
Speaker 1: of its sibling bite and it's the first. It was
Speaker 1: the first to launch, and then e t f s.
Speaker 1: The first mover advantage is very very important. Uh, but
Speaker 1: again it's derivatives, so people don't love it as much
Speaker 1: as if I actually hold the underlying here. So let's
Speaker 1: spend a little time on the derivatives themselves. You mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier about you know, the possibility of tracking errors as
Speaker 1: it relates to future as ETFs. What does that look
Speaker 1: like in practice? When somebody say, well, you know this
Speaker 1: ETF is a tracking errorsospot bitcoin, that makes it less attractive.
Speaker 1: Translate that for someone not spending all their time on
Speaker 1: seeking alpha. So this isn't actually the seeking alpha. That's
Speaker 1: pretty good. Uh. This isn't just unique to bitcoin futures
Speaker 1: et This exists in all derivatives based e t f s. Basically,
Speaker 1: you have a contract, you have exposure. Maybe it's a
Speaker 1: one month, maybe it's a three month contract. But in
Speaker 1: any case, no matter what it is, when you get
Speaker 1: to the end of that the expiration, you have to
Speaker 1: roll that rolled forward that exposure so that you maintain
Speaker 1: it and it doesn't just disappear. And that comes with
Speaker 1: the cost, and people are thinking that with these bitcoin
Speaker 1: futures e t F So I remember spending a lot
Speaker 1: of time on it this time last year was the
Speaker 1: bitcoin futures curve is very upward sloping, so it's very
Speaker 1: expensive to roll that. But that's when bitcoin was going
Speaker 1: straight up, and as we've lived through the past year,
Speaker 1: it hasn't been as dramatic as maybe feared up. Next
Speaker 1: more from Bloomberg's Katie Geifeld on how these crypto ETFs
Speaker 1: are acting similarly to each of the on what that
Speaker 1: means for the broader market, for the people who do
Speaker 1: invest in the futures ETFs as opposed to the ones
Speaker 1: that hold you know, shares and meta or block Is
Speaker 1: this a function of like, I'm sophisticated enough to not
Speaker 1: be scared of derivatives, my compliance department lets me like,
Speaker 1: what sort of the investor profile that does one versus
Speaker 1: the other. I would imagine that for those who invest
Speaker 1: in the bitcoin futures et F. They want bitcoin. They're
Speaker 1: not trying to get exposure to the metaverse or n
Speaker 1: f t s somehow through this kind of tortured portfolio construction.
Speaker 1: They just want bitcoin. And if you have done that,
Speaker 1: if that's the route you've taken, you've actually done better.
Speaker 1: It's a really interesting quirk that actually the crypto equity
Speaker 1: ETFs have performed more poorly than Bitcoin itself. I mean,
Speaker 1: the worst performing et F out there right now, uh,
Speaker 1: non leveraged is ticker r I g z's Bitcoin mining
Speaker 1: e t F. It's down almost seventy percent this year,
Speaker 1: and La Stie checked Bitcoin itself was only down about
Speaker 1: only fifty five or fifty six. This seems like a
Speaker 1: bunch of bad options for for folks who were or
Speaker 1: are trying to get crypto exposure and you know, they
Speaker 1: really want to have access to split bitcoin. What are
Speaker 1: the prospects of you know, that kind of pure pla
Speaker 1: e t F in in the US in the near future.
Speaker 1: It feels like it really has dropped off the radar.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you think back to GBTC, which we
Speaker 1: talked about at the beginning, Gray Scale is in the
Speaker 1: process of suing the SEC over the SEC rejecting their
Speaker 1: application to convert GBTC into a physically backed e t F.
Speaker 1: So people are watching the clock on that. That's the
Speaker 1: process that's expected to take several more months from here,
Speaker 1: if not a year, and then, I mean you have
Speaker 1: others who are just waiting for Gary Gensler to no
Speaker 1: longer be chair at this point. Honestly, it doesn't feel
Speaker 1: like it's an imminent front and center issue for anyone
Speaker 1: right now, and it seems like it's pretty much dropped
Speaker 1: off the priority list of the SEC. Just as as
Speaker 1: kind of a closing thought, is this correlation is this
Speaker 1: point nine like unusually high with it either to each
Speaker 1: other or you know, to other parts of the market
Speaker 1: compared to everything that you're seeing in ecfs, As in,
Speaker 1: if I were a person and I was like coin
Speaker 1: tossing crypto et F versus like an entertainment focused ECF
Speaker 1: or something else, like, is it that there's a similar
Speaker 1: level of underperformance because all the markets are bad? Or
Speaker 1: is crypto really an outlier here? It's true, I mean
Speaker 1: in a down market, which we're living in across asset
Speaker 1: classes right now, correlations tend to go to one in
Speaker 1: times of stress. But if you pull up the charts
Speaker 1: of these correlations, I mean they've been point nine. I
Speaker 1: think this is close to the high water mark for
Speaker 1: a lot of these relationships between the crypto equity e
Speaker 1: T F s. But they always have a very statistic,
Speaker 1: statistically high correlation to each other. I mean, when I'm writing, uh,
Speaker 1: normal story that's not about crypto, for example, and I
Speaker 1: see a point sick to a point seven correlation, I'm like, Wow,
Speaker 1: that is so high. I should write about that point nine.
Speaker 1: I almost yes, what is happening here? Got it all right? Well,
Speaker 1: thank you as always for being on the show. I heard,
Speaker 1: possibly directly, possibly a little bird told me whichever sounds
Speaker 1: more dramatic, that you're doing something crypto and showy that
Speaker 1: might be coming up in the not too distant future.
Speaker 1: Are you allowed to talk about that yet? I don't
Speaker 1: know if I am, I can talk about it in
Speaker 1: case I am excellence, and then we can just cut this.
Speaker 1: If you're not him Stenovic and I uh, he is
Speaker 1: my co anchor. We're putting together a crypto show for
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Quick Take. It's going to be weekly. It's going
Speaker 1: to be taped where Tim has been calling it a
Speaker 1: podcast first approach, not to uh try to encroach on
Speaker 1: your turf, but we want to do deep dive interviews
Speaker 1: and of course you helped us out with the first
Speaker 1: few episodes, which is maybe how I know about it.
Speaker 1: I can't thank you enough. Not a problem. Well, as
Speaker 1: soon as that is out in the world, I hope
Speaker 1: you will come back and tell folks where they can
Speaker 1: find it. Big time excellent. Thank you. You can find
Speaker 1: more of Casey's reporting on the Bloomberg Terminal on Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot com, on Bloomberg Television, on Bloomberg Quicktick, and on Twitter.
Speaker 1: She is at k Greifeld. That's kg r E I
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