Dan Morehead, CEO of a $1 bln cryptocurrency hedge fund Pantera Capital, says today’s crypto markets are “very cheap” and now’s the time to buy. Morehead’s comments came from an interview with CNBC today, June 1st.
Morehead added that with the markets “down 65 percent from their highs,” “it's much cheaper to buy now and participate in the rally as it goes." He offered a rule of thumb for anyone looking to make profits in crypto, suggesting:
“When a [cryptocurrency] breaks through its 200-day moving average, if you buy that day and sell a year later, you make an average of 239 percent … without even thinking about it …
That's the essence of this trade: it rarely ever gets cheap to its long-term average. So today is a good day to be buying."
Speaking of Bitcoin in particular, the CEO said this strategy has proved itself “about five times in the last six years."
Engaging with CNBC’s suggestion that institutional investment would be the next “big catalyst” for a major rally in the crypto sphere, Morehead said the narrative should be adjusted.
“I think there’s an image out there that there’s an ‘on-off switch’: it’s ‘off’ now and [institutions] are going to flick it on some particular date…. We’ve had institutional investors since 2013 and it’s a process. Risk and reward go together… but we’ve yet to have an SEC-regulated custodian, which is the silver bullet everyone’s waiting for.”
Morehead said institutions are in fact already “buying the rumor [of clarified SEC regulations] and selling the fact." He advised investors that getting a position now ahead of quality-regulated custodians coming online would be to their advantage.
With looming regulations still to be finalized, crypto markets remain skittish. CNBC cites figures from the HFR cryptocurrency index, which show market losses of 17.5 percent through April this year.
After last year’s gains of 2,907 percent, CNBC suggests the downturn has impacted crypto hedge fund momentum, with only 5 new funds launched in 2018 so far, compared to 45 in total in 2017.
Morehead’s Pantera Capital, around since 2013, owns about 35 pre-auction ICOs and about 25 liquid blockchain currencies, including Ripple (XRP), Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC).
As Cointelegraph previously reported, its first BTC-only fund returned over 25,000 percent when the coin hit its $20,000 peak in December 2017. The fund remains very bullish on the future of crypto, with Morehead saying that crypto market cap could hit “$40 trln" within ten years in an interview this April.