Celeb-Backed Crypto Fund Not for New Yorkers … Yet

Residents of the world’s financial capital currently can’t invest in the newly launched Titan Crypto fund.


Celebrity-backed fintech startup Titan has launched what it boasts is the first actively managed portfolio of cryptocurrency assets available to all US investors—except for the more than 19 million people who live in New York state.

The firm’s investors include actors Will Smith, Jared Leto, and Ashton Kutcher, and pro athletes Kevin Durant and Odell Beckham Jr. Titan said the portfolio can be used as a hedge because it has minimal correlation to US equities. It also said its investment team conducts fundamental and quantitative research to identify what it believes are the highest quality cryptoassets for the next three to five years or more.  

The team also constructs what is intended to be a concentrated yet balanced portfolio of cryptoassets with strict risk controls to screen out the ones the firm believes involve outsized risks with custody, liquidity, regulatory, and other concerns.

“The adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain protocols is exploding, and we expect this trend to prove structural and long term in nature,” Clay Gardner, co-founder and co-CEO of Titan, said in a statement. “We see the wrong debate being had—it’s not a matter of if crypto deserves a place in portfolios; it’s a matter of what percentage.”

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According to the company, it actively manages the weights of each cryptoasset in the portfolio based on the evolution of each cryptoasset’s utility, adoption, and price action. The team will regularly rebalance and conduct tactical trading during periods of excess volatility to maximize the reward/risk ratio. Although Titan Crypto is currently available to all US residents except those with home addresses in New York, the firm said its crypto partner is waiting for regulatory approval for the fund to be available to the state’s residents.

The fee structure for the fund is 1% of assets under management (AUM) for net deposits of $10,000 or more, or $5 per month for net deposits of less than $10,000. There is also a $100 minimum investment.

In July, Titan closed $58 million in series B fundraising led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors such as Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, as well as from Smith, Leto, Durant, and Beckham.

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Sure, Delta Cut Goldman’s GDP Forecast, but It’s Not Too Bad

Compared with anemic economic growth in the past decade, things are still looking up.


And now comes the Delta retreat, at best a temporary one and not all that drastic. A pullback in services, resulting from the coronavirus’s Delta variant, will hold back US gross domestic product growth (GDP) in 2021’s third quarter, Goldman Sachs warns. The good news, though, is that vibrant economic expansion should resume after that, Goldman economists believe.

The firm expects economic growth will pull back to a 5.5% annual pace this quarter, from its previous 9% projection, wrote Goldman’s chief economist, Jan Hatzius, in a research note. At the center of that will be a contraction in consumption, he said, down 1% this month.

Notable impacts will be delaying returns to the office and shrinking audiences at entertainment events, Hatzius stated. He pointed to data from OpenTable, the dining reservation service, that found a 7% decline in restaurant bookings since the end of July, as Delta took hold. Increases in travel cancellations and delays in elective surgery are other signs of a slowdown, he said.

Small wonder that the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index plunged to 70.2 in its preliminary August reading. This level is way down from July’s 81.2 reading. (The low point during the pandemic thus far was 71.8 in April 2020.)

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In all, Hatzius estimated growth by year-end for 2021 at 6% (down from 6.4% before) and for next year at 4.5% (a slight improvement from the previous 4.4%). He is not alone: The Conference Board research group, for instance, places this year’s GDP increase at 6%.

Certainly, compared with the slow GDP growth following the 2008-09 financial crisis, when readings of 2% were common, those 2021 and 2022 forecasts still look pretty darn good.

What’s more, Hatzius went on, if everything works out, there should be a decent bounce back in September. Looking at Europe’s experience with Delta—the region got hit with the variant first—cases here should dwindle next month, and US consumer outlays should turn around, he contended.

“Lower growth in Q3 should imply stronger growth in Q4 and 2022 as virus fears hopefully diminish and the service sector recovery and inventory rebuild resume, and we have raised our forecasts beyond this quarter,” the Goldman note said.

Meanwhile, Hatzius added, the latest virus spike threatens to worsen the nation’s higher inflation. The Delta incursion, he said, might lead to higher prices for goods that depend on involved supply chains, such as consumer electronics, appliances, and new cars—at least for the moment.

Consequently, Goldman has raised its estimate for year-end 2021 inflation—as measured by the Federal Reserve’s favorite metric, personal consumption expenditures (PCE)—to 3.75%. But just like Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Hatzius termed such a jump transitory. “As prices of these goods and used cars fall next year,” he wrote, “we expect core PCE inflation to dip below 2% next summer and to end 2022 at 2%.”

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