JPMorgan’s Bitcoin About-Face: Why a Crypto Skeptic Is Making Room for the Asset It Once Dismissed

Based on Kurt Robson’s October 20, 2026, report, “JPMorgan Says Bitcoin Will Beat Gold and Stocks — After Years of Crypto Skepticism,” published by Yahoo Finance and originally appearing on CCN, with additional reporting from CNBC and Bloomberg.

JPMorgan’s evolving position on Bitcoin is a striking example of a major financial institution separating its chief executive’s convictions from its clients’ investment preferences. The bank whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, once called Bitcoin a “fraud” now has an asset-management division projecting that the cryptocurrency could outperform U.S. large-cap stocks and gold over the long term. But the shift is not an unqualified embrace: JPMorgan is assigning Bitcoin a place in its investment research while still withholding a place in its main portfolio-allocation models.

The word that best explains this apparent reversal is pragmatism. The evidence points less to Dimon becoming a Bitcoin believer than to JPMorgan acknowledging that an asset can attract sustained client interest, warrant serious analysis and generate business opportunities even when its CEO remains deeply skeptical. That distinction helps explain both the bank’s changing behavior and the important limits on its newfound openness.

What JPMorgan Actually Changed

According to Robson’s reporting for Yahoo Finance, JPMorgan Asset Management’s 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions assign Bitcoin an expected compound annual return of 10%, compared with 7.5% for U.S. large-cap stocks and 5.5% for gold. The outlook examines a long-term investment horizon of approximately 10 to 15 years—not the cryptocurrency’s likely performance over the next few months.

Figures reported by Yahoo Finance from JPMorgan Asset Management’s 2027 assumptions.

Those estimates put Bitcoin’s projected annual return 2.5 percentage points above large-cap equities and 4.5 percentage points above gold. More significant than the ranking, however, is the institutional setting: Bitcoin is being evaluated within the same long-term planning exercise as established investment assets. Bloomberg, in a separate report carried by Yahoo Finance, described this as the first time JPMorgan Asset Management had included Bitcoin in its long-term capital market assumptions.

That is a meaningful change in treatment. An institution does not have to endorse an asset enthusiastically to acknowledge that investors need a disciplined framework for assessing it.

But “JPMorgan forecasts higher Bitcoin returns” is not equivalent to “JPMorgan recommends replacing stocks and gold with Bitcoin.” The firm has explicitly stopped short of incorporating Bitcoin into its core portfolio models.

From “Fraud” to Client Access: The Reversal Was Gradual

The apparent about-face becomes clearer when the chronology is separated into executive commentary, client access and investment research.

• In 2017, Dimon called Bitcoin a “fraud” and threatened to fire employees trading it, according to the history recounted in Robson’s article.

• In 2021, he described Bitcoin as “worthless.” At a Senate hearing in 2023, he said that if he were the government, he would “close it down,” CNBC reported.

• At the World Economic Forum in January 2024, he called Bitcoin a “pet rock,” underscoring his view that it lacked a compelling productive function.

• In May 2025, Dimon said JPMorgan would allow clients to buy Bitcoin, while specifying that the bank would not custody it. CNBC reported that the bank was looking at providing access through Bitcoin exchange-traded funds.

• In October 2026, JPMorgan Asset Management’s long-term assumptions put a numerical return expectation on Bitcoin, while maintaining substantial reservations about its suitability for balanced portfolios.

The pivotal moment was arguably the 2025 access decision rather than the 2026 forecast. It established that Dimon’s personal objections would not necessarily determine what clients could purchase.

“I don’t think you should smoke, but I defend your right to smoke,” Dimon said at the time. “I defend your right to buy bitcoin.”

That was not a declaration of confidence in Bitcoin’s underlying value. It was a statement about the boundary between a bank executive’s judgment and a client’s investment choices.

Why a Big Bank Would Change Course

Client demand makes permanent exclusion harder to sustain

The clearest evidence for the shift comes from JPMorgan’s own client research, as reported by Bloomberg. Approximately one-tenth of surveyed clients said their portfolios held cryptocurrency, while roughly 17% said they planned to “prioritize crypto.” Those figures do not establish that cryptocurrency belongs in every portfolio. They do establish that the subject is commercially relevant to the people the firm serves.

The business implication is straightforward: a wealth manager that refuses to engage with an asset its clients want to discuss risks leaving that conversation—and potentially the associated relationship—to another provider.

Competition reinforces that pressure. When CNBC covered JPMorgan’s May 2025 announcement, it noted that Morgan Stanley already allowed financial advisers to pitch certain spot Bitcoin ETFs to eligible clients. JPMorgan’s move therefore took place in a market where access to Bitcoin investment products was becoming part of the competitive landscape, not merely an ideological debate.

Familiar investment products change the access question

Bitcoin ETFs give investors a way to obtain exposure through a conventional brokerage product rather than directly managing cryptocurrency holdings. Robson’s report identifies BlackRock’s IBIT, which began trading in January 2024, as an important example of that transition.

For a bank, the availability of such products helps separate several decisions that are often treated as one:

• Whether clients should be allowed to obtain exposure.

• Whether the bank should hold the underlying cryptocurrency for them.

• Whether advisers should recommend an allocation.

• Whether researchers should estimate its long-term return.

JPMorgan’s public positions show those decisions proceeding at different speeds: access expanded, direct custody was excluded from the 2025 announcement, and the 2026 research still stopped short of including Bitcoin in main portfolio models.

A developing market demands a more analytical response

Bloomberg reported that JPMorgan’s researchers linked continued investor interest partly to a more developed and better-defined regulatory framework. They also identified clearer regulation, improved liquidity and better price discovery as conditions that could strengthen Bitcoin’s future portfolio usefulness.

The significance is not that regulation has eliminated cryptocurrency risk. Rather, the bank is identifying measurable conditions under which its assessment could change.

That is a different institutional posture from simply dismissing the asset. Bitcoin has become something to monitor, model and potentially accommodate—even if the current conclusion remains cautious.

The Catch: Higher Expected Returns Come With Much Higher Risk

The most important number in the report may not be Bitcoin’s 10% expected return. It may be its 55% projected annualized volatility. Bloomberg reported that this is more than three times the corresponding estimate for U.S. large-cap stocks.

Volatility measures the scale of fluctuations around an investment’s return, not a guaranteed loss or a fixed trading range. A higher expected return therefore does not, by itself, demonstrate that Bitcoin offers the most attractive investment once risk is considered. Bloomberg’s reporting specifically identifies this risk-adjusted limitation as the catch in JPMorgan’s outlook.

The distinction matters because large losses require disproportionately large recoveries. A 50% decline requires a subsequent 100% gain just to return to the starting value. A long-term compound-return assumption should not be read as a promise of steady annual appreciation; Bloomberg notes that sharp fluctuations can erode compounding.

The 10% forecast is therefore a modeled long-term outcome, not a contractual yield, a guaranteed annual gain or proof that Bitcoin is safer than the assets it is projected to outperform.

Why JPMorgan Still Will Not Call Bitcoin a Reliable Diversifier

A portfolio is not simply a collection of assets with high individual expected returns. Its behavior also depends on how those assets move relative to one another.

That is why JPMorgan’s decision to leave Bitcoin out of its main covariance matrices matters. These matrices help evaluate how investments behave together. According to Robson’s reporting, JPMorgan cited Bitcoin’s volatility and unstable correlations as obstacles to its widespread inclusion in portfolios.

Bloomberg quoted the research team even more directly:

“We believe it is premature to consider BTC as a diversifier in a balanced portfolio.”

The implication is particularly important for comparisons with gold. JPMorgan’s higher return forecast for Bitcoin does not establish that Bitcoin can reliably perform gold’s portfolio role. An asset can have greater appreciation potential while remaining less dependable as a counterweight to other holdings. The bank’s current judgment is that Bitcoin’s relationships with other assets are not yet stable enough to justify treating it as a dependable diversifier.

The researchers left room for that assessment to evolve if volatility falls and correlations stabilize. In other words, the bank has opened the analytical door without declaring that Bitcoin has passed every portfolio-construction test.

BlackRock’s Expansion Reveals the Same Commercial Logic

Robson’s Yahoo Finance article places JPMorgan’s forecast alongside BlackRock’s filing for a proposed iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF, with the ticker PBIT. According to the report, the proposed fund would obtain exposure through derivatives rather than investing directly in Bitcoin or Bitcoin exchange-traded products.

Its intended trade-off is revealing: seek downside protection while surrendering some upside. The filing is not the same as a launched product, and a protection-oriented strategy should not be confused with an unconditional guarantee against losses. What the proposal demonstrates is an effort to serve investors who want cryptocurrency exposure but are uncomfortable with its full price swings.

BlackRock’s history also echoes JPMorgan’s tension between earlier skepticism and later commercial participation. As Robson reported, CEO Larry Fink moved from describing Bitcoin as an “index of money laundering” in 2017 to calling it a “legitimate financial instrument” in 2024.

The broader pattern is not simply that financial executives changed their minds. It is that large firms found ways to translate investor demand into familiar investment structures, while retaining distinctions between exposure, risk management and endorsement.

What This About-Face Means—and What It Does Not

For cryptocurrency advocates, JPMorgan’s forecast is a powerful marker of acceptance. Bitwise investment chief Matt Hougan celebrated the inclusion in the firm’s long-term assumptions, while acknowledging that the analysis carried substantial caveats. His reaction captures why the development matters symbolically: an institution associated with forceful criticism is now assigning Bitcoin a potentially attractive long-term return.

For investors and financial-services businesses, the more consequential lesson is organizational rather than ideological.

JPMorgan’s CEO can remain skeptical. Its asset-management researchers can estimate a positive return. Its client-facing businesses can facilitate access. And its portfolio specialists can still decline to classify Bitcoin as a dependable diversifier. The reporting supports all four positions simultaneously.

The bank’s shift is therefore best understood as selective institutional acceptance—not a blanket endorsement of cryptocurrency, not a declaration that Dimon has reversed his personal beliefs, and not evidence that a high expected return overrides suitability concerns.

The real change is that JPMorgan is no longer treating Bitcoin solely as an asset to criticize. It is treating it as an asset its clients own, its competitors accommodate and its researchers must evaluate—with commercial relevance on one side of the ledger and unresolved portfolio risks on the other.