Column: Vanguard, one of our top investment firms, shuns crypto ‘like the plague.’ That’s good for its customers

After Jan. 10, when the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first bitcoin exchange-traded investment products, the biggest investment firms jumped into the pool with both feet, jostling one another to offer their clients, big or small, access to bitcoin funds. “In Vanguard’s view, crypto is more of a speculation than an investment,” Janel Jackson, the firm’s global head of ETF capital markets, stated in the recent message, which was headlined “No bitcoin ETFs at Vanguard? To be fair, Vanguard doesn’t promise that it will never offer bitcoin investments: “We continuously evaluate our brokerage offer and evaluate new product entries to the market,” Vanguard spokeswoman Karyn Baldwin told me by email. But she made it plain that bitcoin ETFs will have a mountain to climb to show they belong with “asset classes such as equities, bonds, and cash, which Vanguard views as the building blocks of a well-balanced, long-term investment portfolio.” All investment firms make a big deal about placing their clients’ interests front and center, but few were based on that principle to the extent of Vanguard. One claimed in a tweet that a Vanguard representative he reached “apologized profusely for management’s lack of vision, admitted they owned Bitcoin personally, and said that they’ve received literally thousands of calls from customers looking to move accounts.” All we can say to that is: “Oh, sure.” Here’s a prediction, though: Vanguard, which has been around for nearly a half-century, will still be around long after crypto has been consigned to the investment craze graveyard, where it belongs.