Guggenheim’s Scott Minerd Says Bitcoin Could Sink to $15K

Scott Minerd, the chief investment officer of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Guggenheim Partners, told CNBC on Friday that he thinks that bitcoin could bottom out at $10,000 to $15,000 in its latest swoon.

In the interview, Minerd said that investors shouldn’t be “anxious to be putting money in bitcoin right now" and predicted that bitcoin could spend the next few years trading sideways before the market turns bullish again.

In December, Minerd told Bloomberg that his firm’s fundamental analysis put bitcoin at $400,000. Just weeks after that in January, he told CNBC that there wasn’t enough institutional demand to support bitcoin’s then-all-time-high of $41,000 and that it could retrace to $20,000. In early February, he gave CNN his highest price target for bitcoin yet: $600,000.

In November, shortly before Minerd’s first bullish price prediction, Guggenheim filed an amendment with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to be able to invest up to almost $500 million in bitcoin through the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which is a unit of Digital Currency Group, CoinDesk's parent company.

In May, Minerd tweeted: “Crypto has proven to be Tulipomania” – a reference to the Dutch tulip bulb market bubble in the 1600s, when the market crashed after a period of speculation.

Update: An earlier version of this story implied that Scott Minerd was changing an earlier prediction for bitcoin's price.