Fidelity Adds Bitcoin Exposure To Traditional ETFs

The Canadian investment manager said the allocation seeks to improve the two funds’ risk-adjusted returns in the future.

Fidelity Investments Canada, the country’s first regulated institutional bitcoin custodian, has added a bitcoin allocation to two of its All-in-One exchange-traded funds, a set of low-risk ETFs that seek to provide investors with exposure to different assets, regions, market capitalizations, and investment styles. The addition will change the funds’ risk ratings to “medium.”

Fidelity said in a Tuesday press release that the decision to add bitcoin exposure to the All-in-One funds “was made for its diversification benefits with the potential to improve risk-adjusted returns going forward.”

The Fidelity All-in-One Balanced ETF provides investors with diversified exposure to different asset classes in different regions of the globe with a neutral mix of 60% equity factors and 40% systematic and actively managed fixed-income ETFs. Although similar, the Fidelity All-in-One Growth ETF has a greater risk appetite and increases equity exposure to seek capital appreciation through an 85% and 15% division, respectively.

The bitcoin allocation is being made through Fidelity’s spot bitcoin ETF, the Fidelity Advantage Bitcoin ETF, launched in November after consecutive failures to get approval from regulators to list a fund that directly invests in BTC in U.S. markets. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved bitcoin-linked ETFs in America last year. However, such offerings invest in futures contracts of bitcoin, meaning they provide indirect bitcoin exposure instead of direct and come with increased costs and limits on the number of contracts it can hold for each month.

Despite a launch marked by new records, the excitement around bitcoin futures ETFs has mostly faded as investors realize the offering might not function as an actual proxy to the bitcoin price. In late October, the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) amassed $1 billion in trading volume in its first day and became the fastest ETF to reach $1 billion in assets the following day; however, as of January 10, 2022, BITO only had increased its holdings marginally to $1.03 billion.