Celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary wants to increase his cryptocurrency holdings from 3% of his portfolio to 7% by the end of 2021, he told CNBC.
O'Leary said he expects regulators to recognize cryptocurrencies as an institutional asset class, but it's unclear when that will happen. He added that infrastructure for compliance is also lacking compared to the systems for traditional assets.
However, he predicts that there will be "trillions of dollars of interest waiting to come on board" when regulators finally approve of cryptocurrencies as an institutional asset class. For bitcoin specifically, if regulators allow financial services companies to treat it as an asset and approve bitcoin-based exchange traded funds in the U.S., he sees "another trillion dollars worth of buying" into the cryptocurrency.O'Leary also said he is betting against airlines because "business travel will never come back to what it was" before the pandemic struck.
"I think the business travel side of the airline business is horrifically bad, and I'm making money shorting airlines," he said, referring to a trading technique where investors borrow shares of a stock from a broker and sell them, hoping to be able to buy them back at a lower price.Airlines have been hammered by border closures and travel restrictions since last year, when Covid first hit. They have endured uncertainty as the virus surged and waned in different parts of the world.
"These are bad, bad, bad businesses. Not because of just pandemics — because people don't need to fly,