Star investor Warren Buffett also makes no secret of his opposition to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin & Co. And yet it is a crypto investment that was the top performer in the portfolio of the investment holding Berkshire Hathaway in 2023.
• Buffett rejects crypto investments
• Crypto-friendly Nubank absolute top performer in Berkshire portfolio
• Is Buffett becoming a crypto enthusiast?
Stock market guru Warren Buffett is not a fan of cryptocurrencies. He has expressed this on numerous occasions. The Oracle of Omaha never tires of emphasizing that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value and that there is therefore no reason why it should rise in the long term. In his opinion, when investing in crypto, you simply hope that there is someone who would be willing to pay even more for a digital currency. The same thing he thinks about a game of Russian roulette, as he told CNBC on Squawk Box in 2023: “Something like Bitcoin is a betting token and has no intrinsic value. But that doesn’t stop people from Wanting to play Russian roulette.”
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However, he can understand the motivation behind it; it is human nature to strive for something that looks like little work but high reward: “The urge to participate in something that looks like easy money is a human one Instinct Unleashed People love the idea of getting rich quick and I can’t blame them […] It’s so human, and once you unleash it, you can’t put it back in the bottle.”
However, the star investor is already adopting a much milder tone than in 2018, when Buffett described Bitcoin as “probably rat poison squared” at the Berkshire shareholders meeting.
Buffett’s attitude toward cryptocurrencies appears to have softened somewhat in other respects, too, although the Berkshire CEO would certainly never go so far as to invest directly in cybercurrencies.
Berkshire Hathaway acquires stake in crypto-friendly Nubank
Nevertheless, the stock market oracle decided to invest in the Brazilian Nubank in 2021, a crypto-friendly bank that allows customers to trade digital currencies such as Bitcoin & Co. and which even has its own cryptocurrency, Nucoin. The bank was founded in 2013 with the aim of “fighting complexity and reinventing financial services to support people in their daily lives,” as it says on the company website. According to its own information, the bank is now one of “the largest digital financial services platforms in the world” and has 90 million customers in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
As Forbes reports, the stock market star had invested half a billion US dollars in the fintech even before Nubank’s IPO. Later, in 2022, Buffett would have increased by another $500 million, according to Benzinga.
Buffett continues to hold on to his investment. According to Berkshire’s investment disclosure to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the investment vehicle owned 107,118,784 shares of Nu Holding, which owns Nubank, in the fourth quarter of 2023. As of the reporting date, these were worth $892.3 million and accounted for 0.26 percent of the overall portfolio.
Nu Holding stock is an absolute top performer in Buffett’s portfolio
For comparison, just a year ago, the investment was worth $435.97 million with the same number of shares. The investment in Nu Holding has more than doubled its value within just one year (+104.67 percent), making it the absolute top performer in the Berkshire portfolio, according to Benzinga.
However, it remains questionable whether the extremely positive development of his indirect crypto investment will convince the star investor to reconsider his opinion of the crypto sector in general. However, the jump in Nu Holding’s price could also be related to the generally positive sentiment in the crypto industry, after all, Bitcoin and Ethereum have already been able to overcome old marks again, such as those of 53,000 US dollars for Bitcoin and 3,000 US dollars for Ethereum. Given the vehemence of his rejection, it seems rather unlikely that Buffett will now end up among the crypto enthusiasts.
Editorial team finanzen.net
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