Have you considered Fidelity has done more research and knows more about Bitcoin than you? Your judgement that it just “seems bad” is rather shallow when it’s being leveled at a decision made by one of the largest asset managers in the world.
It's just as shallow (unless you're a Fidelity insider) to assume they went through a rational process and have a strong legal argument that they're upholding their fiduciary duty to account holders. Big companies make dumb decisions all the time, and financial companies especially when there's money on the table. So far Fidelity seems to be standing alone with this move. Putting 20% of your 401k into bitcoin as a regular person just seems so obviously unwise to me, and the US Dept of Labor seems to agree, so I'll stick by my comment and priors until I see more first-order evidence.
Having Fidelity support Bitcoin, Dogecoin or Ethereum is about as difficult and expensive for them as supporting a new stock or commodity exchange, and about as risky... as long as they don't act as a market maker. They'll almost certainly make money on fees.
Meanwhile they get the marketing value. They spend over $100MM annually on advertising (by way of a quick googling, I have no special insight) so it seems reasonable that they like being talked about, especially by people who might otherwise be avoiding them.
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Have you considered Fidelity has done more research and knows more about Bitcoin than you? Your judgement that it just “seems bad” is rather shallow when it’s being leveled at a decision made by one of the largest asset managers in the world.
It's just as shallow (unless you're a Fidelity insider) to assume they went through a rational process and have a strong legal argument that they're upholding their fiduciary duty to account holders. Big companies make dumb decisions all the time, and financial companies especially when there's money on the table. So far Fidelity seems to be standing alone with this move. Putting 20% of your 401k into bitcoin as a regular person just seems so obviously unwise to me, and the US Dept of Labor seems to agree, so I'll stick by my comment and priors until I see more first-order evidence.
Having Fidelity support Bitcoin, Dogecoin or Ethereum is about as difficult and expensive for them as supporting a new stock or commodity exchange, and about as risky... as long as they don't act as a market maker. They'll almost certainly make money on fees.
Meanwhile they get the marketing value. They spend over $100MM annually on advertising (by way of a quick googling, I have no special insight) so it seems reasonable that they like being talked about, especially by people who might otherwise be avoiding them.