What Is Guggenheim Partners?

Guggenheim Partners is a privately owned global investment and advisory firm with headquarters in Chicago and New York. 

Originally founded by the Guggenheim family back in the late 19th century, the investment firm currently manages over $295 billion in assets and provides a range of insurance, capital markets and real estate advisory services. In 2019, the company was the lead counsel during the $34 billion Redhat IBM acquisition – one of the biggest software deals in history.

More recently, Guggenheim Partners has turned its attention to the rapidly expanding digital currency space and voiced particular interest in one crypto asset. 

On Nov. 29, 2020, Guggenheim publicly announced it had filed an amendment with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to enable it to allocate approximately $500 million worth of its Macro Opportunities Fund to Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). This institutional product allows large financial players to buy and sell shares of a fund that exclusively holds bitcoin in excess of 616,588 coins. (Grayscale, like CoinDesk, is owned by Digital Currency Group.)

On Dec. 17, 2020, Guggenheim Partners CIO Scott Minerd stated it was the company’s belief “that bitcoin should be worth about $400,000 … based on the scarcity and relative valuation such as things like gold as a percentage of GDP” during a Bloomberg TV interview.

A few months later, however, Minerd outlined his short-term concerns for bitcoin’s unsustainable price action during an episode of CNBC’s "Closing Bell" program. The Guggenheim CIO commented, “I think, for the time being, we probably put in the top for bitcoin for the next year or so. And we're likely to see a full retracement back toward the $20,000 level." This sentiment reflected one of his earlier Twitter posts that mentioned bitcoin was becoming vulnerable to a setback and that it was “time to take some money off the table”.