10% Annualized Return but 55% Volatility: Why Has JPMorgan Added BTC to Its Ten-Year Forecast?

Stock News10-21 22:01

According to Woofun AI, JPMorgan Chase (JPM.US) Asset Management has broken nearly a decade of silence by including BTC in its 31-year-old Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions report for the first time.

This move marks a structural shift in how the Wall Street giant perceives digital assets. Although CEO Jamie Dimon long dismissed it as a "fraud," quantitative analysis at the institutional level has now formally begun.

The report uses $83,000 as the current reference price and constructs three price paths spanning the next decade, attempting to clarify BTC's true position within the macro asset landscape.

This transition from public mockery to internal modeling is not a simple reversal of stance, but rather a data-driven reassessment of risk and return.

The core logic of the report lies in projecting BTC's long-term value through different scenarios. The base case assumes a 10% annualized compound return, projecting BTC's price to reach $215,000 after ten years; under the optimistic scenario, the annualized return rises to 16.6%, with a target price of $386,000; and in the pessimistic scenario, the annualized return is -11.2%, with the price potentially falling back to around $25,000.

Notably, the 10% base return performs exceptionally well within JPMorgan's own asset forecast system, significantly outpacing the 7.5% expected return for U.S. large-cap stocks and the 5.5% expected return for gold.

However, high returns come with high risk. Data compiled by Woofun AI shows that the report estimates BTC's annualized volatility at 55%, more than three times the 18% forecast for U.S. equities.

This means investors must endure three times the turbulence of traditional stock markets to obtain a slightly higher expected return.

Given unstable correlations and the lack of cash flows, modeling is extremely difficult. JPMorgan explicitly states that these scenarios are merely potential outcomes under different market conditions and are not yet sufficient to serve as a basis for strategic portfolio allocation at this stage. Therefore, BTC is listed separately and has not entered the mainstream asset table.

Delving into the valuation model, JPMorgan's weighting of BTC pricing factors reveals its core judgment. The report assigns 65% weight to BTC supply growth relative to the expansion of the U.S. dollar and global money supply, 30% weight to its ability to capture allocation funds from gold, and only 5% to network adoption. Under the base scenario, the contribution of network adoption is actually -3.2%.

The money supply model and the gold substitution model each independently calculate an annualized return of 10.7%, pointing to a key conclusion: JPMorgan believes BTC's long-term price depends primarily on the degree of monetary easing and its substitution effect on gold allocation, rather than on-chain narratives.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan's business-side arrangements confirm this logic. This week, its blockchain division Kinexys officially deployed the U.S. dollar deposit token JPM Coin onto the Ethereum mainnet, opening it to institutional clients. Previously, the Kinexys platform had cumulatively processed over $4 trillion in transactions, with daily trading volume reaching $7 billion, and had established two tokenized money market funds on Ethereum.

Jamie Dimon's remarks at last year's investor day also became more pragmatic. He allowed clients to purchase BTC and have it reflected on account statements, but cited "I don't think you should smoke, but I defend your right to smoke" to define the boundary between personal stance and commercial service.

Bitwise's chief investment officer's quip after the report's release precisely summarized Wall Street's typical path for dealing with emerging assets: first ignore, then mock, then fight, and finally write it into long-term capital market assumptions and predict it as the best-performing asset of the next decade.

This process is not accidental but a standardized procedure through which the financial system absorbs new technologies.

JPMorgan strips away emotion through quantitative models, treating BTC as an alternative asset driven by monetary policy and the gold substitution effect, rather than a mere speculative tool. As Kinexys's infrastructure on Ethereum continues to improve, institutional-grade liquidity is gradually accumulating.

This closed loop from theoretical prediction to business implementation indicates that BTC's position in the mainstream financial system has moved from the periphery to the core observation zone. Although its high volatility still constrains large-scale strategic allocation, its attributes as a macro hedging tool have been preliminarily confirmed by top investment banks.

Disclaimer: Investing carries risk. This is not financial advice. The above content should not be regarded as an offer, recommendation, or solicitation on acquiring or disposing of any financial products, any associated discussions, comments, or posts by author or other users should not be considered as such either. It is solely for general information purpose only, which does not consider your own investment objectives, financial situations or needs. TTM assumes no responsibility or warranty for the accuracy and completeness of the information, investors should do their own research and may seek professional advice before investing.

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