James Seyffart: What Every Bitcoin & Gold Investor Needs to Know Right Now

**James Seyffart** (0:00)
I go back to 2017, and it was like long Bitcoin short the banks, right? And now we have one of the largest banks in the world is going to launch a Bitcoin ETF. It should be seen as a big deal. I know some Bitcoiners are looking at this like, come on, like co-opting the banks are actually going in and doing this, and they wanted to disrupt this stuff, and they're going to potentially take advantage of it, but it is what it is.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:24)
Hey, everyone, joining me this week is Senior ETF Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, James Seyffart. James, it's been a while, how are you?

**James Seyffart** (0:32)
I'm good, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me back.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:34)
Yeah, let's talk ETFs. I feel like we haven't covered this on my show in a while. So why don't we start with Bitcoin? What's happening with the Bitcoin ETFs?

**James Seyffart** (0:41)
Yeah, I mean, it's not as exciting to just talk about money's going in, money's going out, but like every once in a while, I think it's probably good to check in for you and your listeners. So I guess I would say, if we go back, you had the collapse in April of early of 2025, right? So almost a year ago at this point. From the bottom there until October 10th, there was like 25, 30 billion dollars that went into the Bitcoin ETFs. Buku, like it did really well. But from October 10th, which everyone listening knows that was not a very good day in the crypto markets or Bitcoin markets specifically, there was about nine billion that left. Everyone in the media was talking about this stuff as like, it's the end, like all this money's pouring out, but like if you don't take a step back and realize like over 25 billion went in in the preceding few months, it's not that big of a deal. Like money goes in and out. That's how these things are supposed to work. But what you want is that trend over the long term to go up. So from February 23rd to like now or towards the end of March, actually a decent amount of money has come in. A lot of that has reversed for two and two and a half billion ish, I think, has come back in. So not all of the outflows have reversed, but things have kind of stabilized. The price is more stabilized. We're making higher lows pretty much every week.
So the Bitcoin ETFs are doing really well. They handled it very well. There was no dislocations in the market or anything like that. So what we're seeing is buying is still happening. We saw some advisors selling in the fourth quarter that we know from 13Fs. Hedge funds sold a decent amount. I think a lot of that has to do with the basis trade. So some of the outflows that I was just talking about likely was almost completely unrelated to what was going on at the price. It was more had to do with the fact that basis, which is when you sell the futures and buy the spot, it's like a risk-free yield that you can get, which you've had plenty of people on here talk about. But the one thing I would say is like, if you have an asset that goes down 50 plus percent and the number is 9 billion, it equated to like, I don't know, 12 and a half, less than 15% of the flows that went in from its launch just a couple of years earlier, that's pretty damn good. That is really, really good. So what ended up happening is it was the OGs that sold the Bitcoin. The Bitcoin ETF holders were diamond hands here. They actually held strong.

**Natalie Brunell** (2:45)
Well, that's what I really want to zero in on because I've seen both you and Eric Balchunas tweet about the fact that you might not expect for people to weather these storms of drawdowns like 50 percent, but in the ETF world, they did. They held on instead of selling.

**James Seyffart** (3:00)
Yeah. So part of it is this is something we were saying from the launch. A lot of people who were not too keen on the ETFs launching were like, they're going to be weak hands. They're going to sell at the first sign of stress. And that's like if you were an ETF holder, you are not somebody that was like sold this ETF, most likely. Like you went out and learned what an ETF is. You went out and learned what this underlying asset is to figure it out. And if you went out and learned, you understand this thing has repeated 70 to 80% drawdowns like throughout its history, right? And also these people putting in their portfolio, think of these Vanguard investors. They're putting their money into their investment accounts every two weeks. Even if it's not at Vanguard directly, a lot of these people are just allocating to a set allocation goal. And if your goal, this is what we talked about before the ETFs even launched, what could happen, 1% allocation, 3% allocation, 5% allocation.