U.S. pension funds aren’t giving up on crypto-currencies. In the midst of the bear market, pension funds say they don’t regret having invested last year, despite significant losses. Some organizations even assure that the market crash is a great opportunity.
Pension funds confirm their interest in crypto-currencies
During the bull run, many pension funds have invested in cryptocurrencies. This is notably the case of Rest Super, one of the largest pension funds in Australia, or KiwiSaver, a fund from New Zealand. The same is true in the United States.
Faced with the bear market, funds that invested during the price explosion are recording significant losses. As our colleagues from the Wall Street Journal report, American pension funds are not giving in to panic.
Ajit Singh, chief investment officer of the Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund, explains that he anticipated the possibility of a market collapse:
“Of course, we would have preferred the opposite, but volatility and large fluctuations were expected.”
As a reminder, the pension fund, which manages the savings of 7,000 current and retired firefighters, invested $25 million in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) in October 2021, shortly before the market’s high. Last November, Bitcoin actually approached $70,000, causing most altcoins to explode in value.
Ajit Singh says the pension fund’s cryptocurrency investments are long-term investments. The manager never planned to resell the digital assets in the short term. Instead, the currencies will be held for a period of three to five years. While confirming its interest in the crypto-asset sector, the pension fund has no plans to inject money back into it at the moment.
The bear market, an opportunity
Other retirement funds go so far as to see the bear market as an opportunity. Indeed, Fairfax Police and Employee Funds believe that now is the time to invest in cryptocurrencies. Catherine Molnar, the fund’s chief investment officer, tells The Wall Street Journal:
“Returns are more attractive right now given that some people are less willing to jump in given the crypto-winter the market is going through.”
The official approached two investment funds, VanEck and Parataxis Capital, to inject $70 million over three years into cryptocurrencies. The Fairfox police officers’ fund has allocated 4.5 percent of its assets to crypto assets, compared to 2.5 percent for the county employees’ fund. The two organizations manage a total of $6.6 billion and have 30,000 beneficiaries. At the same time, however, some structures still consider crypto-investments too risky. This is the case for the California State Teachers’ Retirement Fund.
