Topic: As I was browsing Charles Schwab's crypto offerings.... (Read 166 times)

After an ETF is approved, do you think cryptocurrency exchanges would be permitted to operate in the US? Bitcoin ETFs are primarily intended to benefit institutional investors rather than the general public. Through ETFs, the government will be able to track every buy and sell of Bitcoin, ultimately eliminating anonymity for US citizens. IMO Bitcoin ETF is good for Bitcoin price to rise up but bad for individual Bitcoin investor.

Oh for sure, they're not even remotely comparable. Some jokingly say that MSTR is de facto the first Bitcoin spot ETF. My back-of-the-envelope calculation, taking their total Bitcoin holding of 152,800 and using figures from their last quarterly announcement (Q2 2023) shows that their BTC holding is almost 80% of their total assets.
I wonder if the SEC would intervene if MSTR decided to get rid of all the other operations morphing into a purely Bitcoin-holding entity.

The first sentence I am dying laughing and couldn't agree more lol. Schwab has had the grayscale options for a while now, semi decent exposure to crypto for the skeptics less the 2 percent fee, yikes! I didn't know about their new shifty etf with "crypto exposure companies" Visa I want to say invested in the lightning network or something to that extent. Microstrategy no surprise there! Coinbase I've never been a fan of but I'm sure there stock is doing semi decent? Lol idk. I think they are missing out on a huge one, Nvidia! And quite a few others. Those schwabby Schwabs, you can't teach an old dog new tricks quite well can you? Haha. You'd think they would want to include Bitcoin Depot which just went live on a NASDAQ IPO (bitcoin ATM company)

Yeah, I kind of alluded to Scottrade probably being what people used if they were transitioned to TD Ameritrade:


It's definitely a crap website--glaringly, obviously so when you've got TD Ameritrade and Scottrade to compare it to.  And that surprises me, because Schwab is a big name on Wall Street.  That's pretty bad when startup brokerages like Scottrade, E-Trade, and the like have better UI than one of the old stalwarts.

Thank you!  I think I saw that somewhere else but paid it no mind and should have.  That's another surprise, that we've basically got to resort to googling things on the forum instead of using its native search function.  Jesus, Theymos.

I find it absolutely bizarre, but we all know there are people with more money than brains who wouldn't think twice about paying someone else to hold bitcoin for you.  That you don't actually own, too.

Ah!  I did not know that fact, and that would make sense then.  I do think they hold bitcoin, though I'm sure they have to deal mostly in fiat for their day-to-day business needs just like everyone else.  But there's no way Overstock is on par with a company like Microstrategy, whose stock has basically become a proxy for owning bitcoin, i.e., a way to bet on bitcoin's price action using the stock market.

Thanks for sharing.

Unless I'm missing something, I think it's a bit of a stretch to present companies like Visa or PayPal as crypto-exposed. If anything, they're probably reverse-correlated to the crypto market.
Although, to be fair, your snippet mentions companies' relationship to "digital assets" which is a broad term and could include a lot of different things.


I don't think the fact they accept crypto would be relevant here, unless they're holding large amount of it. It's probably due to Overstock's ownership of tZero (a blockchain-based asset exchange). The same could be true for those other companies, maybe they own subsidiaries involved in cryptos.

Thanks for this post. It's been somewhat confusing to me what some Bitcoin trusts are actually about as well, and it was interesting to read about various options combined in one post. I didn't think people bought things like Coinbase stocks if they were into the crypto market, and Grayscale's idea of "exposure to BTC" without "the challenges of buying, storing, and safekeeping" (taking it all from their official website) is still really weird to me. I don't get why a person can't just buy cryptos, store in a non-custodial wallet, and then sell when feeling like it. There are no challenges here, no need for a trust.

Damn, they are charging 2% expense ration just to hold BTC ? That's insane.
It would be a lot better for a person to directly buy BTC instead but ofcourse if a person doesn't have the technical knowledge then he does have this option though.
It might be good for those people who doesn't want to go through regulatory issues of buying BTC.
Something is better than nothing and so I think it's a positive sign that these firms are slowly getting their hands on bitcoin.

I became a Schwab client when they took over TD Ameritrade who I was a client of because they took over someone else.
They are somewhat limited but depending on your account type and what you have enabled you may see different things.

i.e. they do offer BTC futures trading BUT if you don't have futures enabled on your account you will never see that option.

https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/cryptocurrencies-how-you-could-invest-them

And if you try to find some things that are not enabled for your account they don't even show up. Weird, but it might just be to stop support calls.
OR could be it's a crap website. Or both.


Side note if you don't mind using google you can search just bitcointalk on google by putting in searchterm site:bitcointalk.org
There is no space after the : and bitcointalk.org

-Dave

First off, I apologize if any of what I'm mentioning here is old news or has been discussed in other threads.  The search function on bitcointalk is fucked beyond belief.

For no other reason than I'm awake early with nothing to do, I was looking through my brokerage account's various investment strategies, and I came across a category for crypto--my broker is Schwab as I mentioned in the title, and compared with TD Ameritrade or even Scottrade before the buyouts happened, they blow monkey balls in terms of site navigation and UI.  Anyway, on the one hand I'm damn happy bitcoin (and crypto more generally) is getting serious recognition from institutions as starchy as ol' Schabby.

There's no straight-up bitcoin ETF, of course, but Schwab offers these:



After looking at the Schwab Crypto Thematic ETF, it's clear that if you bought in you wouldn't be buying any coins, any fund with coins, but probably a business or two that might own some crypto.  Meh.  I didn't look at the other one, which is likely even weaker tea.

Next we have the "Crypto Trusts"":



Now these I think I might have heard of before, and this is where I'm thinking that I could be treading on old ground.  But I never actually realized that these "trusts" are traded as OTC stocks.  Of course when I clicked on a couple to see the details, there's pretty much NO information on any of them provided by Schwab.  The only thing I gleaned about the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust shares is this:



This is apparently a fund that holds bitcoin, and I'm not really sure what the difference is between it and a bitcoin ETF.  But in any case, you've gotta laugh sardonically at the
statement, because how many expenses can there be for just being a fund that holds/tracks bitcoin and bitcoin only?  It's not as though it needs to be actively managed, but the net expense ratio is 2%!

And finally, there's Schwab's recommendation for people who really, really don't want to get their hands dirty with crypto but might want to dangle their toes in the muck.  These are regular ol' plain-Jane stocks that presumably have a tangential relationship at least with crypto:



Coinbase, Microstrategy, and Riot definitely make sense. 

PayPal, maybe.  They're just getting started with whatever it is they're eventually going to fuck up. 

Overstock?  I know they accept crypto and I don't think they use a payment processor like many other businesses do that accept bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, but I'm not sure how much they hold at any given time or that it'd be a good play on bitcoin in any case.  They're a retailer after all, and I'd assume that any profits or losses made by holding their stock would be due to their core business and very little to do with their relationship with bitcoin. 

Visa?  Guess I missed something important, because I would never have thought to buy their stock if I wanted exposure to crypto.

So that's Schwib-Schwab's crypto page in a nutshell.  Thought I'd share some of it for those who don't use them or perhaps have never even had an account with a stock broker.  I know there are a lot of young people on the forum who might not have had the chance yet--and let me suggest that if and when you do decide to open an account to make stock trades, steer clear of Schwab.  There are much better brokerages out there (I remember E-Trade circa 2002 and it was kick-ass even then).  And pssst: stay away from Robinhood as well.  They just flat-out suck.