How much Bitcoin should be in your portfolio

Investors typically look to allocate to crypto in their portfolio for two reasons: diversification and growth potential.

Bitcoin has, at times, shown the ability to act like a growth asset in expansionary periods, while then pivoting toward defensive or uncorrelated behaviour during periods of market stress. Ethereum meanwhile, has been observed to reflect thematic drivers of its own, and so maybe less tied to equity cycles.

Understanding how assets move relative to one another is central to portfolio construction. Our analysis indicates that Bitcoin and Ethereum have only a moderate correlation to global equities (22% and 37% respectively) over the past three years, meaning that it may introduce a diversification benefit within a traditional portfolio. This suggests that crypto can bring diversified risk, not necessarily more or less risk. When sized appropriately and depending on period and methodology, diversification effects may be observed.

Crypto in a traditional portfolio

In the table below we compare a traditional 60/40 portfolio with a more modern portfolio with a crypto allocation. This serves as an illustration based on historical data from the last three years.

Interestingly, the time it took each portfolio to recover from its largest fall over the past three years, which happened in response to the US tariffs in April 2025, was less for the two portfolios with crypto (both 17 days) than the traditional portfolio (22 days).