BlackRock Asset Manager Has Been Trading Bitcoin All This Time

BlackRock asset manager hinted previously that it could start trading Bitcoin futures as per an SEC filing which indicated that the company could add BTC futures to its funds down the road as we are reading more in our latest Bitcoin news today.

In the January SEC filing, the investment company BlackRock Asset manager indicated that it could add the BTC futures to its funds down the road but it turns out that it already had. In the new SEC filing, the BlackRock Global Allocation Fund indicated that it has 37 futures contracts from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that are worth nearly $360,458 and this amount represents 0.0014% of the fund’s total assets with the contracts expiring on March 26.

With nearly $9 trillion in assets under management, BlackRock is the world’s biggest investment company in the world ahead of UBS, Fidelity, Vanguard, JPMorgan Chase, BNY Mellon. Fidelity also filed paperwork for a Bitcoin ETF while BNY Mellon commented that it will add BTC custody services and JpMorgan Chase creating a crypto basket so all investors can purchase shares in companies that are exposed to BTC.

BlackRock is not the latest domino in the game, in 2018, CEO Larry Fink believed that the company’s clients were not interested in crypto exposure as he said:

 “Right now I can tell you, worldwide, I have not from one client who said ‘I need to be in this.”

Bitcoin is not the same thing as a futures contract with the latter being a bet on the price of the former without the need to actually purchase. The CME Futures contracts are settled in cash and not tokens so the company announcing in December that it was searching for a VP of Blockchain that has experience in the valuation of digital assets so the actual BTC purchases will likely be in store for BlackRock.

As recently reported, the BlackRock CIO admitted that the company started “dabbling” in BTC but refused to detail the involved sums. Instead, he mentioned that there’s a confluence of chancing factors that triggered a slight change in the policies towards BTC including his own grasp on technology and the improving regulatory landscape. When asked on the future developments, Rieder implied that the current macroeconomic conditions pushed the company towards BTC which means that the deterioration here will boost the bigger buying pressure towards the BTC markets.