Allianz’s celebrated economist and senior economic advisor El Erian-Rues lamented misjudging and selling his BTC at $19,000 in 2020. El-Erian says he will buy again but will wait until the speculators are shaken out of the market.
The renowned economist Mohammed El-Erian has told CNBC he bought Bitcoin during the long crypto winter of 2018. It was when the price of BTC fell from a high of $20,000 to a lowly figure of about $3,000. However, El-Erian regrets that a ‘behavioral mistake’ saw him make a wrong judgment and sell off too early. Speaking during an interview during CNBC’s Dan Murphy on Monday, El-Erian said:
“I felt compelled to buy it — I really did […] I felt like I had framed it. I had this level, and I had an entry point.”
Trading at an average of $60,000
El-Erian says he watched as the number one cryptocurrency came out of the ashes of the $3,000 capitulation and chose to sell when BTC hit that $19,000 mark in 2020. As things stand right now, Bitcoin has since surpassed the level at which it sold by far and is currently trading at an average of $60,000. According to El-Erian, there’s no way of telling the direction Bitcoin’s actual value was likely to take. He chimed:
“You really don’t want to ask me about valuations, because I don’t quite understand why $60,000, as opposed to $68,000, is the right level.”
On its way to replacing the Dollar
Regarding getting back to investing in Bitcoin, El-Erian says he will wait for a while until the market shakes off all speculators before he becomes comfortable enough to repurchase BTC. The famed economist believes in the value of Bitcoin and avers it could be on its way to replacing the Dollar as the dominant legal tender any time soon. He said:
“I think it will always exist in the ecosystem, but it’s not going to be a global currency […] it’s not going to replace the dollar.”
Bitcoin made its debut into the crypto scene in 2010, trading at $0.0008 per token. As of the time of writing, on November 16, 2021, Bitcoin was trading at $60,427 per token. In a hypothetical case, if anyone invested $100 on the first day, they could have bought 125,000 Bitcoins. The initial investment of $100 should have gained over 8,000,000,000% and would now be worth $ 7,553,375,000. Such an investor should have found a slot among Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest people.
Tom is a long-serving freelance writer who specializes in the blockchain and cryptocurrency niche. You may even call him a crypto-enthusiast with over 10-years’ experience in content creation, blog writing, and SEO. He is a philosophical figurehead who believes that to make our world a better place, we must invest in incorruptible products and procedures, of which Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are leading examples.
