JPMorgan forecasts Bitcoin to outperform stocks, gold

JPMorgan built its reputation on skepticism toward Bitcoin: Jamie Dimon called it a fraud in 2017 and has repeated doubts for years even as the bank quietly let clients buy exposure through funds. The firm's Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions report, now in its 31st year, has guided pension funds and advisors on expected returns across stocks, bonds and real estate since the 1990s. Bitcoin's absence from that document, until this edition, signaled institutional reluctance that is now reversed.

Advisors who use JPMorgan's assumptions to build model portfolios now have a formal number to plug in: a 10% base case, with a spread from -9.7% in the bearish scenario to 17% in the bullish one, and volatility near 55%. That range lets allocators run Bitcoin through standard mean-variance frameworks for the first time rather than treating it as an unmodeled outlier. Pension consultants and multi-asset desks gain a citable benchmark; retail investors gain nothing directly, since the figures describe modeling assumptions, not advice.

The next test is whether JPMorgan's private bank and wealth advisors translate this modeling into actual allocation guidance for clients, something the firm has so far withheld. Watch the 2028 edition of the Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions, due roughly a year out, for whether the bank raises, lowers or drops the Bitcoin line entirely, and whether rival houses like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley publish comparable long-horizon return estimates of their own.