The new crop of exchange-traded funds offering direct exposure to
may have accumulated billions in new assets in the two months since they hit the market, but experts say that’s not because advisors have suddenly jumped on the crypto bandwagon.
Most advisors aren’t permitted to talk to clients about the so-called spot Bitcoin funds, of which there are now 11, unless they ask, according to Matt Apkarian, an associate director with Cerulli & Associates. That’s because many—perhaps most—large wealth management firms have policies in place barring advisors from making unsolicited recommendations of investments in digital currencies.
“For advisors, I don’t think [the launch of the new ETFs] changes a thing,” Apkarian says. “They weren’t able to recommend these products before, they’re not able to recommend them now.”
That’s certainly the case at the four nationwide brokers known as wirehouses. Merrill Lynch,
UBS
,
and
all have policies stipulating that advisors can field unsolicited inquiries about the Bitcoin ETFs from clients and make investments on their behalf, but they aren’t permitted to proactively bring up the subject.
Clients who use those firms’ self-directed online investing platforms, like Morgan Stanley’s E*Trade or Wells Fargo’s WellsTrade, can also invest in the funds.
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“Spot bitcoin ETFs are available for unsolicited purchases through an advisor with Wells Fargo Advisors or through our online WellsTrade platform,” a Wells Fargo spokeswoman says.
A survey of 10 firms that operate in various wealth channels revealed some nuance in their policies regarding the Bitcoin ETFs, as well as considerable reluctance to discuss the issue in any detail.
UBS says some, but not all, of the 11 Bitcoin funds are available, but only to brokerage clients, not advisory accounts.
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In the registered investment advisor space, a spokeswoman for Wealth Enhancement Group confirms it has a policy stipulating when advisors can help clients invest in Bitcoin ETFs, but the company declined to discuss any particulars.
A representative of Mariner Wealth Advisors said the company wouldn’t immediately make anyone available to discuss its Bitcoin policies.
Fidelity, which offers its own Bitcoin ETF product, says the fund has seen record levels of flows and activity across investor segments. Fidelity says that its own retail advisors can help clients invest in Bitcoin funds upon request, but that they are required to sign what is called a Designated Investments Agreement that Fidelity uses for certain complex or risky products.
Spokespeople for Raymond James and Edward Jones didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. LPL Financial didn’t immediately make an executive available for comment.
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Several financial services insiders contacted for this story, some of whom didn’t want to be named, indicated that interest in the Bitcoin ETFs increased following the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of the funds in January, but no one views that as an event that opened the floodgates, with advisors suddenly getting swamped by client calls wanting to buy into digital assets.
“SEC approval of Bitcoin ETFs was a huge step in removing a large barrier of entry for Bitcoin,” says Will McGough, director of investments at Prime Capital Investment Advisors. But that was in large part a matter of logistics—that by putting the asset in an ETF wrapper it could suddenly be traded directly and without having to navigate futures contracts. “We haven’t seen broad-based—or even material—demand for digital assets across our platform, though that may change as people chase headlines [and] Bitcoin continues to reach new highs.”
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McGough says that Prime Capital doesn’t include Bitcoin ETFs in any of its public market strategies and reports only getting a “trickle of questions from advisors wanting to hold Bitcoin on behalf of clients.”
“Generally, we view Bitcoin as more a barometer of speculation in the market than a true core asset—basically digital gold with no cash flows to value,” he says.
Risk versus reward. Bitcoin launched in 2009, but crypto is still seen as a novel and speculative asset class by many financial professionals. Nothing in the boom-bust cycle of the past few years, punctuated by dramatic revelations of large-scale fraud with a steady backdrop of smaller schemes getting exposed, has made risk-averse advisors more accepting of digital currencies.
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The approval of the ETFs may have “given more of a comfort level to institutions,” says Vinod Jain, a strategic advisor with Datos Insights. But Bitcoin is still “a new asset class and if you’re offering it, the compliance angle has not been completely identified,” Jain says.
“I think most traditional advisors see more risk in cryptocurrency than reward,” says David Rishel, a partner at ACA Group, a compliance consultancy.
He says that advisor firms have generally put crypto through the same vetting process as they would any other new class of investment, but that those policies were already in place before the ETFs debuted.
“I did not see a lot of conversations about modifying policies, which says to me people had already made choices around Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and the existence of the ETFs didn’t move the needle for them,” Rishel says. “I feel like probably most of the investment advisors have already picked a side on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency even prior to the ETFs, which is why there’s not much movement since the [approval] of the funds.”
So what could change the collective view of the industry? More time, for one, experts say, though they note that with Bitcoin, which has been setting all-time highs this week, it has sometimes seemed hard to find an entry point.
After the spectacular implosion of FTX and the government’s major settlement with Binance, crypto remains frontier territory in the eyes of many financial professionals. And it will likely remain a side play—a footnote, at most, in a client’s financial plan—until Congress or regulators establish meaningful oversight of the sector.
“I think the only way things change from where they currently are is if there’s significant regulation around digital assets,” Cerulli’s Apkarian says. “It’s just got to become a very highly regulated space in order for us to see something change in a major way.”
