Hargreaves Lansdown, the largest retail investment platform in the U.K., which has about $225 billion in assets under management, issued a surprisingly harsh warning to its customers: Stay away from Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency has “no intrinsic value,” it told its clients, and should not be included in their life savings and retirement plans.
HL is the third large financial institution recently to remind customers that crypto might be based on nothing, following Deutsche Bank and Elliott Management.
“While longer-term returns of Bitcoin have been positive, Bitcoin has experienced several periods of extreme losses and is a highly volatile investment—much riskier than stocks or bonds. The HL investment view is that Bitcoin is not an asset class, and we do not think cryptocurrency has characteristics that mean it should be included in portfolios for growth or income and shouldn’t be relied upon to help clients meet their financial goals. Performance assumptions are not possible to analyze for crypto, and unlike other alternative asset classes it has no intrinsic value,” the company said in a statement that also noted the platform would begin offering crypto trades for customers.
A few days ago, Deutsche Bank told clients that Bitcoin was “backed by nothing” even though it would also likely end up being used as a reserve asset by central banks in the next few years.
And back in January, activist investor Elliott Management told clients that Bitcoin faced an “inevitable collapse” because as an asset it has “no substance.”
The argument that crypto has no fundamental value is based on the view that other assets—stocks, bonds, cash, property, or derivatives thereof—usually entitle holders to an underlying right, such as dividends, interest, land, or other legal rights. Crypto, by contrast, is merely a medium of exchange whose price reflects only the balance of supply and demand.
While HL is right that Bitcoin is volatile and risky, it has also been a profitable trade. Bitcoin is currently at $121,000 per coin and is up 30% this year, compared with the S&P 500, which is up 15%.
Fortune contacted HL for comment.
