Over the past few decades, Paul Tudor Jones has amassed a whopping $7.5 billion fortune. Jones got his start trading cotton futures at the New York Cotton Exchange and has since built a career out of his understanding of macroeconomic factors like interest rates and currencies.
But now Jones sees a new frontier abundant with opportunities. Although it isn't often that you see more traditional investors embracing financial innovation, Jones believes "it's hard not to be long crypto."
While he used crypto as an umbrella term in his statement, the hedge fund billionaire is one of the most vocal supporters of the most prominent and valuable cryptocurrency -- Bitcoin (BTC -0.09%). Jones has repeatedly claimed that he allocates about 2% of his massive portfolio to Bitcoin and could see merit in dedicating 5% of a portfolio to Bitcoin exposure.
Jones thinks Bitcoin has a bright future even if it's down more than 60% on the year. He has two primary hypotheses surrounding the promise of Bitcoin and how it will further cement itself as a legitimate asset in the coming years.
Jones' case for Bitcoin
The first has to do with what he calls intellectual capital, which refers to the growing movement of intelligent and talented individuals into the crypto industry. Jones believes that the world's most talented engineers, developers, and entrepreneurs are recognizing the potential that crypto has in an increasingly digital world and are starting to take more jobs in the industry. It's similar to a trend that happened in the 1990s, when the internet was undergoing massive development.
The second reason he is confident that Bitcoin will continue to grow has to do with the current macroeconomic and political environment that is unfolding today. In an interview on CNBC this week, Jones highlighted that the current decade is already shaping up to be vastly different from the last one (2010 to 2019), which was dominated by central bank experimentation of monetary policy. In his view, the dominant theme of the coming decade will consist of economies around the world dealing with the repercussions of this experimentation.
When periods of economic instability occur, as we saw during the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government steps in to keep the economy afloat. To stimulate the economy, the government uses various financial mechanisms, and Jones' concern is that the consequences of implementing these policies aren't always been fully understood.
A hedge against government monetary intervention
The primary tools that the federal government has at its disposal to incentivize economic growth are cutting interest rates and more recently quantitative easing.
Quantitative easing puts more money into circulation through the direct purchases by the central bank of government-backed securities, such as bonds. This approach was used when, with interest rates near zero, the government needed to further stimulate the economy. These injections of liquidity into the economy, under the aegis of the Federal Reserve, then allow banks to lend more and on easier terms.
Jones bases his conviction in Bitcoin because of the potential consequences of this monetary policy. Until the last decade or so, a central bank had never engaged in this kind of policy experimentation. The depth and extent of the effects from this policy are not fully known or understood. Look no further than the argument by Fed officials that rising inflation in early 2021 was "transitory," though it has persisted and now is near a four-decade high.
Jones believes the remainder of the 2020s will be dominated by those repercussions. As they become more evident, he thinks that more people will come to find assets like Bitcoin more desirable because it isn't subject to gamesmanship. Bitcoin's supply is finite; it can't be controlled or tampered with to serve the needs of a particular nation, and it can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection.
For those reasons, Jones still thinks there is an investment opportunity even if the 2020s "will be just the opposite of what we experienced in the last decade." Instead, the opportunity will be in Bitcoin and not your typical stock or bond.
Keep it simple
Investing doesn't have to be complicated. Gaining insight into these types of macro trends from the world's most successful investors is an easy way to keep tabs on current developments and opportunities.
As one of the world's most prominent investors, Paul Tudor Jones thinks that an increasingly digital world and the realization of monetary-policy experimentation will lead to a greater desire for an asset like Bitcoin -- one that could send it to prices "much higher than it is today." Buying at today's prices could be a great opportunity to prepare for an economy that Jones thinks we might be living with for the rest of the decade.
