Should You Buy the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust Fund? It’s on Sale—and That Could Be a Trap. | Barron’s

In closed-end funds, anything trading around 70 cents on the dollar might seem too good to pass up. Investors can get that kind of bargain now in the

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust

But this may be a case where a discount isn’t really worth the price.

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (ticker: GBTC) is the largest publicly traded Bitcoin fund in the world with more than 700,000 investors and $24.1 billion in assets. It’s a private-placement trust that trades like a stock over the counter. It’s also one of the few ways that investors in a publicly traded equity can gain direct exposure to Bitcoin, rather than through futures contracts–the mechanism for exchange-traded funds like the

ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF

(BITO).