The world’s largest pension fund lost the equivalent of Bitcoin’s entire market value in just three months

The world’s largest pension fund lost $165 billion in the first quarter of 2020, equivalent to the entire market value of Bitcoin.

By Michael Kapilkov

Translated by: Zion Editor: Rose

The world’s largest pension fund lost $164.7 billion in the first quarter of 2020. That’s equivalent to the entire market capitalization of Bitcoin (BTC).

Bitcoin isn’t doing much better

The value of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) fell nearly 11% to 150.63 trillion yen ($1.4 trillion). It was the fund’s biggest quarterly drop since 2008.

Dow Jones & Bitcoin Source: Yahoo Finance

GPIF was not the only one to perform poorly, with major indices such as the Dow Jones seeing negative growth. Interestingly, Bitcoin performed almost identically, with its price falling by roughly 11% from January 1 to March 31.

Therefore, in this case, Bitcoin supporters cannot defend Bitcoin's safe haven status. On the other hand, if GPIF invested only 0.1% of its assets under management ($1.5 billion) in Bitcoin at the beginning of the first quarter, this would have created a huge buying pressure on the market. The possible result would be a big rise in Bitcoin and a positive return on the cryptocurrency portion of the pension fund's portfolio.

Small Bitcoin Exposure Could Be Beneficial

However, this is an extremely unlikely scenario. Pension funds are naturally the most conservative investors. Buying $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin (about 208,000 Bitcoins) in a short period of time is almost an impossible task.

Grayscale’s GBTC fund currently holds 386,659 Bitcoins.