Investor Cliff Asness says bitcoin is a bubble unless uses besides speculation and criminality emerge

Cliff Asness, co-founder of AQR Capital Management, believes bitcoin is in a speculative bubble after the cryptocurrency’s swift rally carried it above $100,000 following the November presidential election.

“I’m on the bubble side, on net,” Asness said on CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Monday. “To move me off that, you really need not a price change, but a use case. That’s what could convince me to become maybe more of a crypto person when I find any use for it, aside from speculation and criminality.”

Asness said there are three uses for crypto that he has identified: speculation, use in war-torn countries and paying cyber ransom.

Bitcoin rallied 120% in 2024 after a huge year-end pop on the back of President-elect Donald Trump’s election. Investors hoped Trump would usher in a golden age of crypto, including supportive deregulation of the industry and a national strategic bitcoin reserve. The digital coin has dipped 3% in the new year, last trading near $90,000.

“There’s no fundamental trend for crypto because I don’t know what the fundamentals are, but there is a price trend,” Asness said. “So I would guess most trend followers who have it in their universe are actually long.”

Although Asness is bearish on crypto, he noted that he would not bet against it due to its volatility.

“I wouldn’t short crypto only because shorting things with 100% annual volatility can be a little scary. I think we’ve all discovered what concentrated shorts can do to a portfolio,” he added.

Asness co-founded AQR in 1998 after a stint at Goldman Sachs. He and his partners established the quant-driven firm’s investment philosophy at the University of Chicago’s Ph.D. program, focusing on value and momentum strategies.