Program:  Making Money with Charles Payne
Date:  10/8/2021
Station:  Fox Business News
Time:  2:00PM

CHARLES PAYNE: So all the record books say that it was the month of October, twenty twenty one when the Crown was officially passed to bitcoin and crypto from gold and silver. Now, according to J.P. Morgan, there right now three main drivers for bitcoin’s remarkable October to remember. So I want to get the read from Scott Martin and Meltem Demirors and Scott. Let me go to you, my man, because apparently institutions now see bitcoin as a better inflation hedge than gold. You’ve championed gold on this show for a long time. Is it time to throw in the towel?

SCOTT MARTIN: I have Charles, and I’m holding back tears doing this, but I’m good at doing that, so I won’t cry. I promised myself I would cry. We sold the gold today. I can’t believe it, and that was based on several factors, not because of what some of these institutions are doing, because those are not the guys to follow. In my opinion, as an independent adviser and one that manages ETFs and such. But the reality is this Charles, because of some recent data and certainly the performance of our friend Jld and some of the other ETFs that are out there in the gold space, it just hasn’t been there. As far as the non correlation in some of the upside capture. So while I don’t think that answer is as is the bitcoins or the theorems or the Solana’s, the reality is gold is just not handling itself very well as that alternative asset space in our portfolios right now. So I just think gold is not the thing to hold right now. I don’t think some of the bitcoin stuff is right, either, if that’s what you’re looking to replace it with.

PAYNE: OK, so Milton, Meltem, in the meantime, institutional investors are rushing in like gangbusters venture capitalists. I read where Mark Andresen shopped. The funding has gone through the roof from hundreds of millions to billions. So at least are the credibility questions over right now. Do you feel like as someone who’s championed this space, you took a lot of slings and arrows from these famous international types that you can finally say, OK, don’t question that credibility anymore?

MELTEM DEMIRORIS: Yeah, look, Scott, I’ll take the W all day. I’m sorry, but I’ll take the W. I think we are definitely at the point one percent of global aum across all asset classes is now in crypto. Of that, 50 percent is bitcoin and 50 percent is everything else. Crypto is here. 20 percent of Americans own bitcoin. This is no longer a fringe asset class. This is a diverse asset category that has publicly listed equities, including my company CoinShares. We have ETFs with exposure to equity. We’ve ETPs with exposure to digital assets themselves. We have the coin, so we have venture funds, we have SPACs. It is a growing and really robust category and I’m really excited about the opportunity ahead. We see a lot of opportunity for growth. And as we like to say in the industry, Q4 is the start of the madness. We’re calling it up tober, by the way, Charles. So this is not October, it’s uOtober.

SCOTT MARTIN: Just be ready for the volatility.

DEMIRORS: Hey, that’s the price of opportunity- price of opportunities, the volatility,

MARTIN: But different from alternatives of yesteryear, in my opinion, but no problem.

PAYNE: All right, so, so real quick, then I’m going to come back to you, Scott, but I do want to squeeze in with Meltem. The NFT is worthy. They stand there also having a pretty strong month there up Tobar as well.

DEMIRORS: Yes. I mean, yeah, I’ll talk about NFT’s, so yeah. Look, I think, you know, people love buying luxury goods. LVMH with a $400 billion company and they produce artificial scarcity, right? People buy handbags, people buy expensive cars, watches and have to use our digital flex right. For people like me, I spend all of my time on my laptop. I don’t need Chanel bags. I need digital flex. And so I think NFT is in many ways are filling this interesting new niche as we enter the so-called metaverse as we live increasingly online. We need different ways to sort of flex online. Right now, NFTs are very much focused on art and sort of displaying our unique clothes. We’re also calling them IS or profile photo NFTs, but are also seeing games using NFTs, luxury brands using NFTs. And I think it’s still a really early space, but want again where there’s tremendous growth for multiple different types of opportunities, whether it’s new brands, legacy brands, lot of space.

PAYNE: Let me only go. Got 30 seconds. I’m going to give Scott the last word, Scott. She mentioned the metaverse. You know, flossing on the metaverse. It sounds like you and me are going to be stuck outside the metaverse fishing. I mean, you’re going to jump at any of that stuff. Maybe some of these equity is riot, MHRA, Coinbase. Anyways, you’re going to get exposure to this space.

MARTIN: Yeah, we have some clients that have some of the riot, some of the DLC blockchain, and I think those are those are good if that’s the exposure you want. I also agree with Meltem, though you need exposure to the coins through Coinbase. You can actually trade the exact coins. And one quick point on the NFT, you can’t bring it in in stores and steal them, Gucci and all those. At least they’re unpreventable that way.

PAYNE:  We got to leave it there. I’m handing it over to Lauren Simonetti Lauren to see.