JPMorgan Data Shows Retail Investors Overwhelm Wall Street Institutions In Bitcoin (BTC) Purchases

As Bitcoin (BTC) and the overall cryptocurrency market surges to new highs, Wall Street banking giant JPMorgan has presented a new data that shows that retail investors have been strongly buying and have rather overwhelmed institutional players.

Just taking a look at PayPal and Square’s data as proxy, retail investors have purchased 187,000 Bitcoins so far in 2021. On the other hand, institutional investors have purchased only 173,000 during the same period.

While institutions completely dominated BTC purchases during the second half of 2020, the recent developments show that retail players have strongly balanced Bitcoin inflows in recent times.

Over the last year, retail participation in Bitcoin has also gathered steam on the backdrop of strong institutional buying. With the U.S. government recently unveiling its $1.9 trillion fiscal stimulus, expectations are high that retail investors will put part of their stimulus checks into Bitcoin (BTC).

Out of the $1.9 trillion stimulus, $380 billion will come as direct bank transfers in the form of $1400 in checks to individuals. As per the latest survey by Mizuho Securities, nearly 10% i.e. $40 billion of the $380 billion will come to Bitcoin and stocks.

The Mizuho analysts note that they carried a survey of 235 individuals having less than $150,000 in household income. Nearly 2 out of 5 recipients responded that they are willing to invest part of these checks. Interestingly, it turns out that most of the investors prefer Bitcoin over stocks.

Mizuho managing director Dan Dolev told Yahoo Finance: "The survey predicts that bitcoin will account for 60% of total incremental investment spend. We calculate it could add as much as 2-3% to bitcoin's current $1.1t trillion market value”.

However, in his recent post on LinkedIn, billion investor and founder of Bridgewater Associates writes that the U.S. government might prohibit any fresh capital inflows into Bitcoin (BTC) along with Gold.

Dalio states that the U.S. government might bring shocking tax hikes to manipulate the flows into different asset classes. “If history and logic are to be a guide, policy makers who are short of money will raise taxes and won’t like these capital movements out of debt assets and into other storehold of wealth assets and other tax domains so they could very well impose prohibitions against capital movements to other assets (e.g., gold, Bitcoin, etc.) and other locations,” he adds.

However, Dalio also adds that cash will continue to be trash if inflation picks up and hence one must put their money in a “well-diversified” portfolio.