Bitcoin Forum

Highlights:





Red hot: Houston firefighters pension fund goes crypto (https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/10/21/red-hot-houstons-firefighters-pension-fund-goes-crypto)

Although 25$ million represents less than 0,5% of their total funds, I think that is good news for bitcoin and ethereum enthusiasts. Serious investors help crypto currencies to grow solid and dilute volatility, what prevents deep corrections and crashes in the market. News like this should be spreaded to most people as possible, so they can also suggest crypto investments for the pension funds or investment funds in general they belong.

Do you agree news like this have a positive impact or are they indifferent in your opinion?

That makes me wonder about where the coins he bought for the fund were purchased and how they're going to be stored.  I think it's very cool that Singh chose to buy BTC and ETH outright (if I'm reading this correctly) instead of opting for derivatives, though I'm not sure if those futures/derivatives are any more risky than just owning the underlying coins.

IMO any more than that would be playing with fire--no pun intended.  There's a reason crypto generally doesn't correlate with other asset classes, and I think that's because it's such a new thing and hasn't attracted the attention of huge institutional investors who tend to buy and sell stocks and whatever else in tandem. 

Firefighters are among the bravest people in the world, and I really hope this investment strategy of Singh's bears fruit.  $25 million doesn't seem like a lot for a pension fund, but maybe that's because I'm not in that industry.

Funds like that have been investing into diverse options like this for quite some time, taking more risks than we would think of such an organisation, so Inam not really surprised about this. But things like this are the first steps into mass addoption and it makes me hopefull.

$25 million is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the amount of money circulating through Bitcoin on a daily basis, and a very cautious investment as it represents only 0.5% of the total fund. No doubt this is good news, but I don’t believe it can have any significant impact globally, perhaps in the US, or even just in the local community.

However, this is not the first case of pension funds investing in Bitcoin(indirectly), as it started happening 2 years ago.

it becomes everyone's freedom to manage their finances in investing, every thing is considered good or bad and only time will tell. Hope we are always wise in making decisions

Well this type of investment from institutions are good news to the btc community, it boost the reputation of btc in the eyes of other institutions even higher, I guess when btc price has hit a much higher price this investment will increase the total funds of the company. Good decision by the firefighters.

The idea of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies being least correlated to any first class asset is completely justified. The whole reason why some people fled to cryptocurrencies during pandemic was because of the inability of the government to sustain the general demand and jobs, the inability of big companies to tackle inflation and people had to rely on other things, bitcoin's value rose during the pandemic which is an exceptional job in itself. But the whole point would be to *be able to monitor the funds calmly and securely* they are not the first company to invest their money like this, rather they have to worry more about doing it properly.
I sincerely believe that the whole idea of having a pension fund is sustainability and security, therefore there institutions even though might be doing a good job have to employee people who are very well versed with cryptocurrencies and trading.
Overall an exceptional news, seeing bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies getting adopted more and more.

I really hope that news like this have a positive impact on the crypto market. It's another asset manager that goes for the crypto market. Like you said yourself, 0.45% of their assets is not a lot to invest in crypto. For them it's probably just a form of tail risk management. If crypto markets keep rising than they are invested and will profit of it. And its another way to get rid of your access cash. Most of these large investment funds have fixed limits of how much money they can invest in stocks and bonds. So going for cryptos can be a way to get around such restrictions.
25m is not a lot for the crypto market, the direct effect on the prices should be marginal to indefferent. But there is a longterm effect as well, all the other asset managers and pension funds will read about this move and face some dilemma now. Should the consider investing themselves or not. If the fund will make a good profit of their crypto holdings the other funds who didn't buy any will look very bad.

I'm not too surprised by this because sooner or later something like this will happen.
on the other hand this is a pretty good first step for massive adoption.
on the other hand this is a pretty good thing for crypto holders especially indeed bitcoin and ether because indirectly this will be a breath of fresh air for them with adoption like this it will definitely trigger something extraordinary in the future.

I hope that they bought more BTC than ETH, and not the vice versa or 50/50, because while Bitcoin is a relatively safe bet, ETH has only been riding the various useless hypes like ICO, DeFi, NFT - and it won't be able to ride them forever, at some point the market will tire of them like it grew tired of beanie babies. Ethereum, despite continuously making bold claims, still hasn't helped create something useful for the real world, and not just crypto speculators.

Why are you so worried about if it's a wise decision when he chose Bitcoin and Ethereum to invest in the first place? I'm sure he's doing his own research and $25mn is just a small amount if you compare it to their total funds. It's actually helping the adoption of Bitcoin to move fast and soon people will recognize Bitcoin as a currency.

Imagine a government employee investing in Bitcoin and is planning to hodl it for a long time? Although, we don't know what are their plan in the future about of the money but I guess inflation had something to do with it that's why he made a wise decision to invest their retirement funds.

This is the angle that I'm considering. If such amount of money be pumped into buying cryptocurrency that is huge and it will push more liquity, pricing is going to appreciate. This is a positive news that make hodlers that understand the market to buy more in expectation of increase.

Anything that do talks about recognition or adoption towards Bitcoin then its always been a good news as long there would be some recognitions out of those investors even on what part or industry
they do came from then having this additional would always been good.

Pension fund invested? Quite risky but they do know on what they are doing because they cant really just make such decision without looking those risk.

They wont really be that dumb on making such action without looking into those probable situations that they may facing on.

100% agree

Cryptocurrency is the best investment asset for everyone's future and it is very wise to start investing in crypto from now on

I hope things like this can be done by other institutions so that retirees can feel the extraordinary benefits of investing in crypto in the future

Talking about the volatility of Bitcoin, I do wonder whether the volatility is something that is ever going to end. Since the market is based on demand and supply, when there are no supply any longer, and the demand continues, will the volatility be any less than what it is right now?

Anyways, it’s good that there are now big institutions and companies that are considering Bitcoin as a store of value. I don’t think they made a wrong choice by choosing Bitcoin to store their value, because in few years to come the price of Bitcoin as we all know it is going to increase more than what we have now. A lot of analysts had predicted the price to reach $100,000 in a few years, and then investing at this time puts them in a better position to be able to make a better profit in a short time. This kind of news is starting to become a regular news and I’m always looking forward to news like this.

No, it is not at all indifferent, on the contrary, it is very important news in creating a positive general community towards Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, such news gives great incentives to people who do not have enough conviction about cryptocurrencies, and it forces governments to legislate (regulatory laws of cryptocurrencies) in order to deal with these new things that are beginning to emerge in the real world.
In my opinion, publishing such news is very encouraging for the growth of cryptocurrencies and helps accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrencies.

I tend to agree, though it is not give a huge impact at least, it will help Bitcoin that react and will increase the price. 
Oh, why?  I heard a lot of good news these days it seems it will trigger to make another new ATH, it might not only twice and I have suspected that there could be another one.

However, this idea might be risky for them if the price goes down and it could also have benefits if the price goes up.  I hope they already understand the word volatile and are ready to face possible consequences ahead.

That is big amount of money. And we can see how serious he is, taking the high risks. But he is in his own considaration and also choices to take the risks.
That is because he really trust in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The goos thing is that he invested in two top crypto. So the risks may be less than investing in hype coins which must not be done.
every good news may give influence. But let's see how big the influence is to make for crypto industry.

I think, this is much better to hear rather than them buying these meme tokens.
BTC and ETH are rock solid and most of us believe that choosing the top 2 alts is a good decision.
Before they invested those million-dollar funds, I am certain that they have done their own homework here.
So I am assuming they know what they are doing and they know how to safeguard those funds.
We will be reading more related news in the coming days as some entities are really interested in crypto these days.

$25m is a big amount. I find them taking it as an experiment. Based on the profit generated with time there is more chance of more investment. The way they've chosen the coins for investment is really good. This shows the plan of long term plans than short term profiting. As said this isn't gonna make big impact on the market in terms of growth, but maybe other state firefighters organization too can follow this. When this happens gradually the community keeps widening. This in long term could make some combined impact over the market.

$25 million, that's a big enough fund to be included in the investment category they can buy tens of Bitcoin and Ethereum, this is one thing that deserves to be considered positive from firefighting circles.

I'm sure if they do that according to the news date released October 21, 2021, with a Bitcoin buy price of $60,163 it's clear they have made a huge profit today with a Bitcoin selling price of $65,469, the same can happen with ethereum, what they are doing is a very positive thing to profit from the crypto world, this is awesome for a retired firefighter in Houston.

I was wondering if any other retirees would dare to follow in the footsteps of retiring in Houston, investing in crypto especially Bitcoin.

Even their invested funds are only 0.5% of their total asset, I am little concerned about what are their plans against bear markets of bitcoin as we do have at least 1 year bearish trend in 4 year cycle. If they have come to this investment plan after long due diligence then I am happier that they might have planned for longer holding like holding all their bitcoins for next 5 to 10 years to enjoy better returns.

At the same time, if they try to fish just because of Tesla and few other institutions are trying then they may face disappointments and may start spreading negative opinion to all others who may come up with similar plans in near future.

That's great news indeed.
I haven't thought that US citizens will be supporters of the said coins. It's like they'll just say, that money would be better off another fund or index rather than cryptocurrencies with high volatility. We don't see this much and I don't think even mainstream media would cover a news like it.
Tried to dig more and yes, coindesk also made an article about it for those who worry about the site provided by OP.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/21/houston-firefighters-pension-fund-makes-bitcoin-ether-purchase/

Even though Bitcoin might be regarded as a high risk investment, it is good for these pension funds to take some risk for possible high returns. The 0,5% investment of the total Pension fund is hardly a drop in a ocean ...so a total collapse in Bitcoin will not even hurt it.

The $25 000 000 investment can be one of their best decisions in a couple of years... or it can go to zero. (I have seen 800% profits on my Bitcoin investments, so I am very happy with my decision)  ;)

I understand that there are some places that will keep on investing into crypto that is worthy of news. However do we really think that firefighters pension fund investing 25 million is really a newsworthy thing? We literally had Tesla buying 1.5 billion dollars worth of bitcoin this year, it was literally this year, that is 60x more money. So at this point I say we should not be shocked about big financial investments in crypto.

You know what would be newsworthy? Amazon buying 1+ billion dollars worthy, or microsoft creating their own token etc etc, those are big names that actually have a meaning. So, if Elon tweets he will buy 25 million dollars worth of bitcoin, that would increase the price of bitcoin way more than firefighters pension fund could ever increase.

I agree with others that the possible impact is going to be very limited, but the important thing here is that little by little it will become more and more common for pension funds to allocate a small part in crypto (I would say better just Bitcoin). They also cannot allocate a large percentage because of the volatility. They need stability in the price to pay those who are retiring and as the price of Bitcoin today is not stable but volatile, the only way they can include it and avoid that volatility is to invest only a small part of the portfolio.

From my views both the market price getting accelerated or appreciate as you side, all are correct, i just want to let you know even the news alone will increase the chances of increment of cryptocurrency especially bitcoin which the investment is pointing fingers at, at least more people will began to invest in bitcoin if they have equivalent opportunity of money for investment, all these, is another method of promoting bitcoin, because the news have gone viral and many more will like to follow the step, while the process of following the step, bitcoin will be getting accelerated as i said initially.

The first part of this story is really interesting for me. according to this passage, he didn't risk even 1 percent of this total funds into this market and this shows us how they do risk management and how they manage their total fund many people are going all in hoping to earn millions of dollars in a few hours which is totally wrong. However, other than the money management point, I see a shiny future and better situation whenever I find an article like this one saying about investing in the crypto market.

The amount is too small to generate any kind of big impact, however it does not means it is not positive and it is a sign of things to come, many books about investing recommend having a small amount of your capital in a store of value just in case the economic system happened to crash.

The amount allocated to this depends on the author with some recommending something as little as 1% while others recommend as much as 10%, so while 0.5% is even lower than the minimum I have seen, I think this will become a tendency as more institutional investors and funds get interested in the market we will see them investing a small amount of their capital in the market, causing a slow and steady growth over the next decades.

this is a pretty good thing even if it's just a drop from the ocean as you say.
on the other hand to be 0 I think it's very impossible to happen but seeing you have made such a big profit is one of the most extraordinary achievements and I am also motivated by what you do with such profits.
Of course this requires a long process and time, but I will not skip this process because it is with a process like this that makes us have a good achievement.

In crypto, if you don't take the risk, then you will never experience the profits you're always dreaming of. But the firefighters might be so brave and even fearless that they are taking such risk with a very huge amount of funds. If bitcoin price will bloom in the future, then all of them will be possible future billionaires in the making. However, if the value ends up very low which i think will always be possible with such a volatile coin, then they should start accepting the fact that they have made a very bad decision once in their life.

After this, we will expect more big institutions to start investing in crypto as they will start to realize how valuable crypto is. Although this brings a lot of risk since you are risking your funds with no definite returns, but if you have faith in crypto particularly with bitcoin, all these risks and fears will turn into a huge profits that will make your investments definitely worth it. Maybe its just a matter of courage so you can reach to a point where you can say that this is the real life you want to live for. Not just big institutions i guess but also big names all over the world.

This isn't gonna be their bad decision of life even if there is massive drop out of market volatility. The organization will experience loss only if they're in need of the fund immediately or within specific time frame. If the fund is an investment to make profit without time deadline, then the firefighters have done the right thing at the right time. Because they should have the ability to hold until the market turns bullish.

This is indeed good news. When more and more people see Bitcoin, more and more institutions will see Bitcoin, which may be able to further promote the development of Bitcoin. In the future, cryptocurrency may become the mainstream (mainstream of investment).

With the adoption rate growing and the market cap increasing, I can guarantee they have nothing to lose for now.
it's true here is the riskiest and most volatile place but on the other hand actually with the development of bitcoin getting better it's not a big problem because if you look at the development of bitcoin every year it always increases and it will be very difficult to make them worthless for now.

This huge investment coming into bitcoin blockchain is a reason we may see bitcoin price not dropping greatly because it gives smaller investors hope for bull this season. The dominance of bitcoin and increase marketcap is keeping more investors to hodl. Comparing the 2017 to this time, the volatility is steadily increasing .

They won't have to worry about it in the short term. They are not putting every single dollar they have into crypto, just like many other big companies and hedge funds, they are putting just a small portion of their whole fund into this.

It means that if in the short term the price drops a lot (which I believe they bought way before this period, so they are already in profit) that means they could just hold it and wait. They could use every other investment they have and the liquidity they have to pay for the pension needs of the people who gets it, and then when crypto goes up they could sell some of that and put it in other stuff and keep the initial 25 million in. The ability to wait out the crashes is the thing that makes these rich people get richer.

What happened on 2017 is just purely a bubble and the adoption by that time was not so huge that's why we see the dumping is continuous when the market is on bear since no one actually catch up the price when its falling and the one people does at that time is selling and getting panic when everything is collapsing but now institutional imvestors are in crypto many big names and rich guys are now supporting it so we cannot expect a hard dump now since bitcoin is a strong currency now and that decision they made for investing their pension for longterm is maybe a good decision since they can possibly get more money from it un future once bitcoin pump and reach for 6 digits in figures.

It will surely have a positive impact on the situation of Bitcoin but it also has a huge risk for pensioners especially if they have entered the market during the ATH. However, Bitcoin is still surprising and it could even exceed our expectations. Lots of pensioners are already securing their money in crypto which simply means that it's the best investment for a long-term run so far.

This one is both positive and negative in many senses. I mean they are staking the government funds which are supposed to fund the pensions of fire fighters. They won’t like it if Singh loses it over crypto currencies volatility. I am not concern about the bitcoin that much but imagine ETH being unlimited in number could have down turn in the future and they could swap the whole 25 millions in blink of an eye if ETH fell for stupid reason.

The positive stuff here is easy, you have staked the money, you can grow it with the time of bitcoin and eth grows and this more money to spare on government pension schemes.

Although they might have thought this through and staking just 0.5% money it’s worth a shot.

Pensions come from a state fund in my country, and there's a part of taxes that goes towards the fund. But as our Minister of Finance said recently, anyone younger than 40 in 2021 cannot even hope to get this pension because the nation's getting older and the fund can barely pay the benefits to people who are already entitled. So instead, our country will be moving towards state-owned and private pension funds that invest money into things. AFAIK, pension funds usually aren't allowed to make investments that aren't deemed low-risk, and it's not the first time I see a pension fund investing some money into Bitcoin. So I suppose it means Bitcoin isn't considered a high-risk investment, which is good news.

Interesting news. Pension & retirement funds from the public sector are amongst the largest beast of nature in the market. These normally put their funds into stable, well cared for companies that rarely give surprises - like dividend kings or large bond issuing corporations, utilities,... The fact that this fund has chosen bitcoin is really good news but also speaks of the craze of a market in which interest are yielding nearly nothing.

Agreed, what is happening now is what we thought it was happening in 2017, back then there was this expectation the world at large will see the development of bitcoin and will see how much potential it had and they will come to the market, but that did not happen, which is what eventually caused the money to run out and the crash we all remember.

However this time things are slightly different in the way we now have the support of institutional investors and instead of a decrease in that support it is to be expected that it goes up, so any crash we may see in the price is no going to be as bad as what we experimented before.