To be clear, Bicknell still thinks of bitcoin as a speculative investment. “It's not a perfect correlation, but think about it like you would Venture Capital, or something like that, where it's very volatile, and there's differences in, obviously, the management of those things. But the risk perspective, to me, is still the same.”
Differentiating Your Firm
I’ve been coaching advisors for years on the importance of differentiating your business, of finding ways to make the decision to work with you a binary choice, meaning, there’s you and then there’s every other “commodity” advisor in your town lumped together. Bicknell has elevated this idea to a fine art.
From an investment perspective, you can’t differentiate your firm if you’re stuck using traditional assets like stocks, bonds, ETFs, and real estate. I can google that allocation and ACH money to Betterment.
By contrast, Bicknell says, “We like to find specialty themed, opportunistic investment products to bring to our clients.” Bitcoin fits that description and it’s one way he’s helping Mariner Wealth Advisors be on the winning side of the binary choice.
Bitcoin, of course, is not the only way Mariner differentiates itself from competitors. But it exemplifies the underlying ethos of a firm that wants to be an innovator, a leader in keeping itself and its clients on the front edge of a rapidly changing world.
Next Steps
In May 2020, the great hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones said his firm had invested about 1-2% of its assets in bitcoin. Back then he called it “a great speculation.” In a December 3, 2020 interview, he said, “I think crypto is going to have a crazy rocket ship ride up and down along the way but my guess is that something like bitcoin in particular will be substantially higher 20 years from now.”
Michael Saylor, the CEO of publicly traded MicroStrategy, led his firm to purchase 475 million dollars worth of bitcoin over the course of 2020. Saylor said, “Bitcoin is the world’s best treasury reserve asset and the emerging dominant monetary network. It is the solution to the store of value problem faced by every individual, corporation, & government on earth.”
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Square, recently announced that Square had purchased 50 million dollars worth of bitcoin as part of its Treasury reserve assets. In 2018, Dorsey said, “The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be bitcoin.”
These three leaders are paving the way in their respective industries to make bitcoin “safe” to buy.
Likewise, Bicknell, with his industry stature and reputation, is now opening the floodgates for other financial advisors to follow suit and explore bitcoin for their clients.