FBTC vs BITQ: A Matter of Levers

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So, here we are. Two ways to play the digital gold rush. Fidelity’s FBTC, which is just…Bitcoin. Straight up. Bitwise’s BITQ, which is a basket of companies hoping Bitcoin makes them look good. It’s a simple choice, really. Or it should be. So it goes.

FBTC buys the thing. BITQ buys the idea of the thing. One’s a lever directly on the price, the other a complicated Rube Goldberg machine. Both aim to capture the same updraft, but with different degrees of… well, directness. It’s about how much control you want, or how much you’re willing to surrender to the whims of management and market sentiment. A trader understands that. It’s all levers, isn’t it?

Snapshot (The Numbers, As If They Mattered)

Metric FBTC BITQ
Issuer Fidelity Bitwise
Expense ratio 0.25% 0.85%
1-yr return (as of 2026-01-20) -14.92% 17.11 %
Beta 0.00 3.20
AUM $17.68 billion $354.58 million

Expense ratios. Always the little thief. BITQ takes a bigger cut, naturally. More hands in the pot. The one-year return? A random walk, mostly. The Beta tells you how much the thing bounces around with everything else. AUM? Just a measure of how many other people are playing the same game. It doesn’t change the odds. So it goes.

Performance & Risk: A Brief Illusion of Control

Metric FBTC BITQ
Max drawdown (2 y) -32.64% -51.22%
Growth of $1,000 over 2 years $1,922 $2,023

Drawdowns. The inevitable plunge. BITQ took a bigger hit, which is what you’d expect from something more complicated. The growth of a thousand dollars? A rounding error in the grand scheme of things. These numbers are just… data points. They don’t predict the future. They simply describe the past, which is already gone. So it goes.

What’s Inside: The Guts of the Beast

BITQ is stuffed with 33 companies. Mostly financial services and tech, hoping to benefit from the crypto wave. Iren Ltd, Coinbase, Microstrategy… names you’ll recognize if you’ve been paying attention. Or not. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a diversified play, which means it’s diluted. FBTC? Just Bitcoin. Pure, unadulterated, volatile Bitcoin. It’s a blunt instrument, really. But sometimes, that’s what you need.

The problem with companies is that they have… problems. Management, regulations, competition, bad luck. Bitcoin doesn’t have any of those. It just… is. It goes up, it goes down. It’s honest, in a way. So it goes.

What This Means: A Choice, Not a Conviction

When things get shaky, these two funds behave differently. FBTC mirrors Bitcoin’s price swings. It’s transparent. BITQ… it’s a mess of correlated variables. It might benefit from a crypto boom, but it’ll also suffer from general market malaise. It’s a lever on a lever, and those get complicated quickly.

The choice isn’t about believing in crypto. It’s about how much you want to control. Do you want a direct line to the asset, or do you want to filter it through the noise of the market? FBTC is for the purists. BITQ is for those who like to complicate things. Most people like to complicate things. So it goes.

Glossary: Words We Use to Feel Smarter

ETF (Exchange-traded fund): A basket of stuff traded like a stock.
Expense ratio: What they charge you for the privilege.
AUM (Assets under management): How much money they’re playing with.
1-yr return: What you made, or lost.
Beta: How much it bounces around.
Max drawdown: The biggest hole you dug.
Total return: Everything added up.
Portfolio diversification: Spreading the risk around.
Direct exposure: Owning the thing.
Indirect exposure: Owning the idea of the thing.
Yield: What they pay you to hold it.
Sector allocation: Where they put the money.

In the end, it’s all just numbers on a screen. And the universe doesn’t care about your portfolio. So it goes.

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2026-01-22 03:22