Thomas Peterffy, the billionaire founder of retail brokerage Interactive Brokers Group, said investors should own some Bitcoin though limit their holdings given the asset’s volatility.
“I would recommend that people put maybe 2% to 3% of their net worth into Bitcoin,” he said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “We for example will not allow anyone to invest more than 10% of their assets into Bitcoin because I think that would be very dangerous.”
The executive — who has a net worth of about US$53 billion ($71.25 billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — said he is “sort of scared” of crypto because of its price fluctuations. “It doesn’t have any underlying value. The only value it has is the same as the paper dollar, which is nothing,” he said.
Interactive Brokers introduced cryptocurrency trading in 2021, allowing users to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash through a partnership with crypto brokerage Paxos Trust brokerages.
“I think anybody who does not have Bitcoin should have some Bitcoin, but not too much,” Peterffy said Wednesday.
Peterffy said the biggest impact of the incoming Trump administration will be less regulation and less interference with private enterprise. He’s “extremely optimistic” about the next four years and beyond, he said. Still, for all the pro-growth policies, he expressed concern that markets are becoming overextended.
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“And sometime in the future we will have a downturn in the markets,” he said. “But I don’t think it is going to be a very violent — it will not go very far.”
