AMP Super cut its Bitcoin exposure ahead of the abrupt crypto sell-off last week, attributing the timely pivot to the soundness of its trading signals. 

The $60 billion super fund first invested in Bitcoin futures through its dynamic asset allocation program in May 2024. The position, while representing only a tiny portion of AMP Super’s portfolio, was notable for making the retail player the first Australian super fund and one of the earliest global pension investors to back cryptocurrency.  

Stuart Eliot, AMP Super head of portfolio design and management, tells Investment Magazine that the fund trimmed its Bitcoin exposure to around 0.02 per cent ($12 million) of the portfolio “a while ago”. The fund had about $50 million invested in Bitcoin as of December 2025.  

When trading Bitcoin positions, AMP Super worked with signals including price momentum, investor sentiment and measures of liquidity and inflation. 

“We’ve had essentially no exposure during most of the recent sell-off,” Eliot says. 

“The recent price movement has been an excellent test of their [our Bitcoin forecasting model’s] ability to de-risk when required.” 

The Bitcoin investment sits within AMP’s MySuper and ‘Future Directions’ options.  

The digital currency rout deleted almost US$700 billion in value from the crypto market value between the week of 31 January and 6 February, after which the market saw some rebound, according to data from CoinGecko. The price of the bellwether digital currency Bitcoin is down almost 50 per cent from its all-time high in October 2025.  

Investors were struggling to pinpoint the exact drivers behind the sharp downturn, but some believe it to be a spill-over of volatility in other markets, including a heavy sell-off in technology stocks.  

However, the fact remains that prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are difficult to predict, and it is one of the biggest factors that puts super funds off from investing in them. When explaining his aversion to the asset class, UniSuper chief investment officer John Pearce said: “What am I going to say [to members] about losing 30 per cent in Bitcoin? I thought it was going up and it went down? That’s just not a valid reason.” 

AMP Super’s thesis is that Bitcoin should be treated as a store-of-value asset. At a global Fiduciary Investors Symposium last November, Eliot said that, when evaluated on the basis of scarcity, durability, portability and liquidity, Bitcoin fits into the definition of store-of-value assets better than gold or fiat money.  

These assets have an important role to play in the pension context in terms of protecting the real value of portfolio, hedging against monetary debasement and event risk, and improving portfolio returns and Sharpe ratio, Eliot argued.   

In a paper Eliot co-authored with Jonas Benner, senior quantitative researcher at AMP, the duo acknowledged that while Bitcoin is still significantly more volatile than gold or other major currencies, it should not disqualify its store of value nature. 

“In the early collectible and store-of-value phases, volatility is a feature rather than a bug: the market is discovering a price as new participants arrive, expectations shift and liquidity deepens,” the paper read. 

“For investors, the implication is… that any allocation needs to be sized appropriately within a diversified portfolio and viewed through a long-term lens.”