- Growth stock picker Gerry Frigon says crypto could be the biggest opportunity in the stock market.
- Frigon told Insider how he’s investing in cryptocurrency and payment infrastructure.
- His core growth fund has out-returned 94% of similar funds over the past five years.
Crypto investors have all sorts of lingo they use to tell each other to keep their money where it is no matter what happens — because in the world of cryptocurrencies, pretty much anything that can happen will happen at some point.
Fund manager Gerry Frigon says he’s still betting on crypto, too, despite a steep decline in prices since November and a market environment where investors have become averse to risk. But his approach to making investors money is less about buying specific cryptocurrencies and more about figuring out what will happen to money and payments in the future.
“We think that the biggest opportunities are in blockchain and crypto, and we are looking for every opportunity to invest in infrastructure,” he told Insider. “We’ve been focused on payments for years, and we think we’re finally coming to the point where there’s a big disruption to the payment structure.”
Frigon, the CEO and investment chief at Taylor Frigon Capital Management, has built up a very strong track record investing in small- and mid-size companies; even with the recent losses, Morningstar says he’s outperformed 94% of small-cap growth funds for the past five years.
Based on his conversations with investors, Frigon says they’re becoming more comfortable with the new currencies, but are watching for signs of its approval and wider acceptance.
“It needs to centralize to some extent in order to gain adoption and then eventually decentralize again, as people get more comfortable with what that all means,” he explained.
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Frigon says his core growth portfolio has three plays on the themes of crypto’s acceptance and the infrastructure plays within the crypto industry. The largest is the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which he described as a “first mover” in the business.
“Coinbase really has made it possible for institutional investors to participate in crypto with a more formal kind of custodial infrastructure,” he said. “You’re relying on them and paying them to handle the physical cold storage. I think that is a necessary step for institutions.”
In other words, Coinbase makes investing in crypto seem a little more traditional, and that will allow more people — and more financial institutions — to feel comfortable getting involved in the space. He says that will in turn help Coinbase and its peers shake up the payment system.
Frigon also has positions in crypto-focused fintech Silvergate and in digital asset platform Voyager Digital. Voyager Digital is already a brokerage, another formal step that could make some investors more comfortable that they know what they’re getting.
“We’re very focused on how payments are going to be disrupted with this new blockchain technology,” he said, adding that a company like Circle could become a major contributor to a rising digitally-based challenge to Visa and Mastercard.
On the hardware side, Frigon says he no longer holds Nvidia stock because it outgrew the parameters of his fund, but its GPU chips will remain the preferred chip for high-performance applications like crypto mining.