Finance News
By Sydney TheCMO
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Beliefs Drive Ownership More Than Demographics. The numbers on expected returns are kind of wild. Crypto owners, on average, expect a 22% return…
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Gambling Income, Durable Goods, and Volatile Demand. There's a consumption angle here too. The study found that crypto wealth gets treated more like…
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What This Means for Future Crypto Demand. The broader takeaway from the paper is that retail crypto demand isn't just a function of where…
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A Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland study dropped a pretty clear finding: what people *believe* about crypto returns matters more than almost anything else in determining whether…
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The researchers — Michael Weber, Bernardo Candia, Olivier Coibion, and Yuriy Gorodnichenko — pulled data from up to 25,000 US households.
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The numbers on expected returns are kind of wild. Crypto owners, on average, expect a 22% return over the following year. Non-owners? Seven percent.
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Demographics still matter, just less than you'd think. People under 40 are 13 percentage points more likely to own crypto than those over 60, even after controlling for other…
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The experiment itself ran in 2025. Households were randomly assigned information about Bitcoin, stocks, GameStop, or inflation.
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There's a consumption angle here too. The study found that crypto wealth gets treated more like "gambling income" than a stable financial asset.
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Related: Retail Traders Show Caution as Bitcoin Dominance Holds Amid Flat Crypto Weekend
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That's a pretty telling sign of how crypto wealth is perceived, even by the people who hold it.
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The risk perception gap is also worth sitting with. Crypto owners see their holdings as less risky than non-owners do.
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So volatility feeds on itself. A price spike generates positive return stories, those stories reach people who cited information gaps as their reason for staying out, those…
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Related: Dollars Future Hangs on Treasury Yields and Fed Credibility Amid Market Turmoil
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Men under 40 with higher incomes are still the most likely crypto holders. But the study's real point is that demographic targeting only gets you so far in predicting who buys…
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