Bill Miller, former chairman of Legg Mason Capital Management.
Heidi Gutman/CNBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images
- Bill Miller recently revealed that half of his personal net worth is invested in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
- He made the admission in a nearly hour-long interview with WealthTrack on Friday.
- “My reasoning was there are a lot more people using it now. There’s a lot more money going into it in the venture capital world,” he said.
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Legendary investor Bill Miller recently revealed that half of his personal net worth is invested in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, going against his own widely known advice that investors should allocate just 1%-2% of their portfolios to digital assets.
In a nearly hour-long interview with WealthTrack on Friday, he said he first bought bitcoin in 2014 when it was trading around $200. He kept purchasing more and stopped when it rose to roughly $500.
Then he started buying bitcoin again in the spring of 2021 when the coin was hovering around $30,000-level, just after it crashed from its then all-time-high of roughly $66,000.
Miller, who now calls himself a bitcoin bull instead a bitcoin observer, told WealthTrack he has been adding to various bitcoin-related investments since then, citing MicroStrategy as one of them.
“My reasoning was there are a lot more people using it now. There’s a lot more money going into it in the venture capital world. There are a lot of people who are skeptics, who are, now, at least, trying it out,” he added.
As for the rest of his portfolio, Miller said he invested the remaining in Amazon. In April 2021, Miller said in an interview he was likely the largest individual shareholder of Amazon “whose last name isn’t Bezos.”
Miller is a former chairman of Legg Mason Capital Management Value Trust, and is best known for outperforming the S&P 500 for 15 consecutive years when he was with the investment giant. He is now the chief investment officer at Miller Value Partners, a company he founded back in 1999.
In the interview with WealthTrack, Miller also likened bitcoin to digital gold in terms of hedging against inflation, adding that it’s also an “insurance policy against a financial catastrophe that no one else can provide” given its supply limit of 21 million coins.
Miller then brought up a common argument against the world’s largest digital asset that proposes bitcoin has no intrinsic value.
As an analogy, the 72-year-old investor brought up the Mickey Mantle baseball card that sold for $5 million in January 2021 or Pablo Picasso’s paintings that command hundreds of millions.
“It comes down to the very basic level of supply and demand,” he told WealthTrack. “Bitcoin is the only economic entity where the supply is unaffected by the demand.”
Still, he warned against the volatility of bitcoin, which he described as “very dangerous” for short-term investors.
Read the original article on Business Insider 
