- A section from a recent Bitcoin report by Fidelity Digital Investments has been misconstrued as investment advice by Bitcoin bulls
- The section asked readers to “consider” a 5% Bitcoin portfolio allocation, which some saw as an investment recommendation
- The piece was actually a recommendation of how to deal with Bitcoin’s volatility
A recent report by Fidelity Digital Assets has had Bitcoin bulls falling over each other with proclamations that the investment giant is recommending a 5% Bitcoin portfolio allocation to, seemingly, everyone. This has turned out to be nothing more than a misreading of a section on portfolio management however, a mistake that was caused by nothing more than a desperation to confirm a pre-existing bias and one that has once again made the space seem amateurish.
Fidelity Asks Users to “Consider” 5% Bitcoin Investment (or Not)
The section in question, which was widely cited as ‘proof’ that Fidelity had offered investment advice in a freely available public report, concerned Fidelity’s suggestion of how to manage Bitcoin in a portfolio.
In it, Fidelity advised readers to “Consider a portfolio with a target allocation of 5% bitcoin.” Out of context this could be considered investment advice, and out of context is exactly how some Bitcoin bulls took it:
Fidelity just recommended that investors allocate 5% to Bitcoin.
Fidelity has $3.3 trillion AUM.
Investing 5% into Bitcoin would be an additional $165 billion of capital flooding into Bitcoin.
You have to be crazy to not own Bitcoin at this point.
— Yano (@JasonYanowitz) October 14, 2020
However, when taken in context with what followed, the sentence takes on a completely different meaning – the rest of the paragraph illustrates what to do with your 5% Bitcoin holding depending on how its notoriously volatile price changes over time:
It quickly becomes apparent that the report is not advising you to take the trade (as if a free, publicly available report would ever do so) but is simply showing those unused to Bitcoin how to potentially manage it. This error was down to a simple misinterpretation of the word ‘consider’, caused by an unhealthy amount of pro-Bitcoin bias.
Misreading Smacks of Desperation
The misreading (and subsequent mis-posting) of this section of the Fidelity report is illustrative of how Bitcoin bulls can be so blinded by their own positivity about the cryptocurrency that they misconstrue neutral statements to fit their pre-existing narrative. This only smacks of desperation for Bitcoin’s approval and brings embarrassment to the space as a whole.
