Don’t think that investing in bitcoin BTCUSD -2.00%, which is going up all the time, was the best idea of the year.
The cryptocurrency made news when its value shot up by almost 130% in 2024. This was partly due to hopes that the new government in Washington, D.C., would flood the digital-asset industry with public dollars.
Financial records show that this year, nearly 400 U.S. stocks and 20 digital currencies gave even better returns.
Myra Saefong of BourseWatch says that the humble cocoa bean CC00 -1.40% did the same thing.
Once more, cocoa nuts aren’t very useful. Besides making chocolate, they’re not very useful for anything else. This is a very niche product that almost no one wants. If you compare this to other currencies, bitcoin is very important for everyday things like moving money and betting on its price.
It brings up the age-old question of whether being good or lucky is better.
The price of bitcoin makes someone who bought genome-testing biotech stock GeneDX WGS +0.28% at the beginning of the year laugh. They’ve made 28 times their money in 2024, as the stock has gone from $2.75 at the beginning of the year to $77.40 now.
At the beginning of the year, you could have bought 89 cents worth of stock in Quantum Computing QUBT +4.04%, a very high-tech computer company. Each of those shares is worth $17.60 now, which is twenty times as much.
In total, FactSet shows more than 400 stocks that have gone up more than 130% this year. There are still more than 100 stocks worth more than $500 million after you take out tiny stocks, over-the-counter stocks, and really, really small companies.
Not only are high-tech stocks like Palantir PLTR +0.42% (up 370%) and MicroStrategy MSTR -6.82% (up nearly 600%) on this list, but so are some well-known Main Street names as well. This year, online car buyer Carvana CVNA -1.19% (up more than 300%), Freddie Mac FMCC -0.17% (up 200%), and salad chain Sweetgreen SG -6.52% (up 200%) all did better than bitcoin. Even United Airlines UAL +1.88%, which is up 136%, is not far behind.
It has also lagged behind almost 20 other cryptocurrencies, such as mantra (up 6,000%), pepe PEPEUSD +0.66% (up 1,300%), dogwifhat WIFUSD +0.48% (up 1,200%), bitget token (up 600%), XRP XRPUSD -1.03% (up 260%), and Elon Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, dogecoin DOGEUSD +0.86% (up 250%).
Everyone on Wall Street has better luck than you do.
The crypto boom brings up some interesting issues. This is another question about what these online digital tokens are for, besides being used to move money and bet on the tokens themselves.
At first, it was said that bitcoin was a liberal idea that would create a “people’s money” that would not be controlled by the government. But recently, bitcoin bros have thrown this argument out the window and started calling for new U.S. President Donald Trump to set up a “national bitcoin reserve” that would be run by the federal government.
To put it another way, they want the Trump government to use taxpayer money to buy their bitcoins at the high prices of today.
Pres.-elect Trump seems to be okay with it.
Perhaps this is why the price of bitcoin has gone up 40% since the election.
OpenSecrets, a Washington, D.C.-based charity that keeps track of political donations, told MarketWatch that the cryptocurrency industry gave $148 million to federal candidates in the last election.
Some people might say that the “new era” of crypto looks a lot like the old era.
At the same time, the total value of all the bitcoins in circulation around the world is $1.9 trillion. FactSet says that’s 50% more than what the U.S. energy industry is worth on the market right now, and that industry made a net profit of $110 million last year.
