AIMCo Reveals Kibosh on Cryptocurrencies

Posted on 12/27/2019

Executives at the Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) in a Legislative meeting held on June 21, 2019 gave their opinions on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. AIMCo manages a number of funds and pensions, including the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund.

From the transcript:

Dale MacMaster, Chief Investment Officer, Alberta Investment Management Corporation

Kevin Uebelein, Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Investment Management Corporation

Getson, Shane C., Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland (UCP)

Gotfried, Richard, Calgary-Fish Creek (UCP), Chair

***

Mr. Getson: It does. May I have a follow-up?

The Chair: One more question.

Mr. Getson: The one follow-up is somewhat related. Again, attention deficit leads me down another path on the tech side of things. How does the Bitcoin world play into this? It’s kind of a wild card out there.

Mr. MacMaster: Yeah. I’m trying to ignore what’s going on with Bitcoin. You know, that’s just an area of deep speculation. We don’t attempt to try and understand. Nor does, I think, anyone. If you look at the performance of that, it’s been quite wild, and people have lost a lot of money. It’s an area of speculation and excitement. You see this in markets from time to time, whether it’s gold or the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, and cryptocurrencies is one of the latest fads. We would caution investors.

Mr. Uebelein: To be sure, the underlying technology behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will have an application across many businesses, but with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies alone there’s not a valuation model that we understand that would cause us to invest in those for their own sake.

***

The AIMCO executives also said that they believe growth stocks are excessively overvalued in today’s market, while value stocks have underperformed. They also revealed that if interest rates remain low, infrastructure, private equity, and private equity will continue to do well.

At June 2019, Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund had C$ 1,400,000,000 invested in Alberta throughout the portfolio, while AIMCo has around C$8 billion in total invested in Alberta.