JPMorgan Expects Bitcoin to Beat Stocks and Gold: But There’s a Catch

JPMorgan Asset Management has included bitcoin in its long-term capital-market assumptions for the first time, predicting a 10% annual compounded return over the next 10 to 15 years. Interestingly, this assessment would put BTC ahead of US large-cap stocks, real estate investment trusts, gold, and bonds. Nevertheless, the bank’s analysts still warned about the cryptocurrency’s extreme volatility and unstable correlations. It’s obvious that we are far from the days when JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, used to bash the leading cryptocurrency at every opportunity he had. Now, the bank’s assumption puts bitcoin’s expected annualized returns for the next 10-15 years at 10% in its base case. In contrast, US large-cap equities received a more modest 7.5% annually, US REITs 8.2%, and gold 5.5%. In other words, BTC carries the highest modeled return among those headline assets in the banking giant’s long-term framework. The report is designed for strategic portfolio planning rather than short-term trading. JPM said its assumptions cover more than 200 asset classes and are intended to help investors evaluate 10- to 15-year allocations rather than predict near-term price moves. In its 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions, JPM included a formal return forecast for bitcoin for the first time in the report’s over 30-year history. The range outlined in the analysis is also quite wide, as the bearish scenario envisions a 9.7% annual return, while the bullish case reaches up to 17% per year. Despite the bullish prediction above, the bank, which spent a long time bashing the largest cryptocurrency, is not suddenly treating it as a conventional portfolio asset. The report estimated BTC’s volatility at around 55%, far above equities, bonds, and gold. It also stressed that bitcoin’s unstable correlation with other assets remains a major obstacle to strategic portfolio inclusion. Consequently, the cryptocurrency has not yet been added to JPM’s main covariance matrices, although the bank now provides a separate, smaller matrix for bitcoin against selected public-market assets. This matters because the 10% estimate is not a price target, not an allocation recommendation, and not a guarantee that BTC will indeed outperform stocks. It is a long-term expected-return assumption used in portfolio modeling. The post JPMorgan Expects Bitcoin to Beat Stocks and Gold: But There’s a Catch appeared first on CryptoPotato.