Should you buy gold, Bitcoin or both?

Dubai: Gold and Bitcoin are increasingly part of the same investment conversation, whether as stores of value, portfolio diversifiers or hedges against economic uncertainty. As gold trades near record highs and Bitcoin continues to mature as an institutional asset, Ivan Lee, Head of Trading at QCP, shares his perspective on institutional positioning, the evolution of Bitcoin as an investment asset, and how investors should assess both gold and digital assets over the long term. Bitcoin and gold often move in different directions during periods of market stress. From your perspective, how much of these short-term divergences are driven by liquidity conditions, leverage and market positioning, rather than a shift in Bitcoin's long-term "digital gold" narrative? Ivan Lee, Head of Trading at QCP Ivan Lee: From where I sit on the desk, these divergences are largely a function of market plumbing. Gold's marginal buyer is often a central bank or reserve manager, slow-moving and largely price-insensitive. Bitcoin's marginal buyer is frequently leveraged, and the market never closes, so it absorbs shocks in hours when nothing else is open. When funding gets crowded or the dollar and real yields move sharply, Bitcoin clears positions first and thinks later. Our own market colour through the recent move illustrates the point. The first leg looked like short covering, and it only broadened once spot ETF inflows came through. That tells you about positioning and flows over a handful of sessions. A thesis measured in decades gets settled somewhere else entirely. I treat the narrative as a long-horizon question and the daily correlation as a liquidity one. Gold has reached record highs, supported by geopolitical tensions and strong central bank demand. How are institutional investors currently positioning gold and Bitcoin? Are they increasingly viewed as complementary assets, or are they competing for the same portfolio allocation? Ivan Lee: Institutions increasingly treat them as complementary. Gold is held for resilience: a strategic diversifier and a hedge against geopolitical or financial-system stress, with an official-sector bid behind it. Bitcoin is held for a different set of exposures: monetary credibility, digital ownership and the growing share of value that settles on digital rails. The roles rhyme at the level of a store-of-value conversation. The volatility, liquidity behaviour and governance are very different. There is competition at the margin because risk budgets are finite. In practice, though, we rarely see anyone fund a Bitcoin position by selling gold. It usually comes out of cash or the alternatives sleeve, which suggests investors have each asset answering a separate question. When speaking with institutional investors, family offices and sovereign entities, where is the strongest interest today: physical gold, Bitcoin or a combination of both? What factors are driving that preference? Ivan Lee: It splits fairly cleanly by mandate. Where the priority is reserve resilience, collateral quality and behaviour in an immediate crisis, the conversation starts with gold. Where the priority is portability, digitally native settlement and long-term monetary optionality, Bitcoin enters the discussion. Sovereign and corporate treasuries sit closer to the first camp. Family offices have the flexibility to hold both, and often do. One consistent pattern is generational. In Asia in particular, the impetus to allocate to digital assets usually comes from the next generation. The generation that built the wealth tends to stay closer to what it already knows. What determines whether it actually happens is more mundane: custody arrangements, governance, liquidity needs and the size of drawdown the mandate can carry. Gold provides thousands of years of history and physical ownership, while Bitcoin offers portability, transparency and global accessibility. From an institutional risk-management perspective, which asset is currently easier to own, secure and manage? Ivan Lee: Gold is easier to govern because its ownership, custody and stress behaviour are already familiar to every risk committee. It carries its own frictions. Vaulting, insurance, transport, assay and chain of title all have to be managed, and gold is straightforward to hold right up until the moment you need to move it. An exchange-traded product removes much of that operational burden and introduces an intermediary in its place. Bitcoin is the easier asset to move and trade across time zones, and its transaction history is transparent at the network level. Institutional custody has improved considerably: qualified custodians, segregation and multi-party controls. Key management, cyber security, legal finality and regulatory treatment still demand specialist controls. There is no universal winner here. The easier asset is whichever one your existing control framework already understands. One of the key challenges associated with both assets is custody.