Dubai: Gold and Bitcoin are increasingly part of the same investment conversation, whether as stores of value, portfolio diversifiers or hedges against economic uncertainty.As gold trades near record highs and Bitcoin continues to mature as an institutional asset, Ivan Lee, Head of Trading at QCP, shares his perspective on institutional positioning, the evolution of Bitcoin as an investment asset, and how investors should assess both gold and digital assets over the long term.Bitcoin and gold often move in different directions during periods of market stress. From your perspective, how much of these short-term divergences are driven by liquidity conditions, leverage and market positioning, rather than a shift in Bitcoin's long-term "digital gold" narrative?van Lee, Head of Trading at QCPIvan Lee: From where I sit on the desk, these divergences are largely a function of market plumbing. Gold's marginal buyer is often a central bank or reserve manager, slow-moving and largely price-insensitive. Bitcoin's marginal buyer is frequently leveraged, and the market never closes, so it absorbs shocks in hours when nothing else is open. When funding gets crowded or the dollar and real yields move sharply, Bitcoin clears positions first and thinks later.Our own market colour through the recent move illustrates the point. The first leg looked like short covering, and it only broadened once spot ETF inflows came through. That tells you about positioning and flows over a handful of sessions. A thesis measured in decades gets settled somewhere else entirely. I treat the narrative as a long-horizon question and the daily correlation as a liquidity one.Gold has reached record highs, supported by geopolitical tensions and strong central bank demand. How are institutional investors currently positioning gold and Bitcoin? Are they increasingly viewed as complementary assets, or are they competing for the same portfolio allocation?Ivan Lee: Institutions increasingly treat them as complementary.Gold is held for resilience: a strategic diversifier and a hedge against geopolitical or financial-system stress, with an official-sector bid behind it. Bitcoin is held for a different set of exposures: monetary credibility, digital ownership and the growing share of value that settles on digital rails. The roles rhyme at the level of a store-of-value conversation. The volatility, liquidity behaviour and governance are very different.There is competition at the margin because risk budgets are finite. In practice, though, we rarely see anyone fund a Bitcoin position by selling gold. It usually comes out of cash or the alternatives sleeve, which suggests investors have each asset answering a separate question.When speaking with institutional investors, family offices and sovereign entities, where is the strongest interest today: physical gold, Bitcoin or a combination of both? What factors are driving that preference?Ivan Lee: It splits fairly cleanly by mandate. Where the priority is reserve resilience, collateral quality and behaviour in an immediate crisis, the conversation starts with gold. Where the priority is portability, digitally native settlement and long-term monetary optionality, Bitcoin enters the discussion. Sovereign and corporate treasuries sit closer to the first camp. Family offices have the flexibility to hold both, and often do.One consistent pattern is generational. In Asia in particular, the impetus to allocate to digital assets usually comes from the next generation. The generation that built the wealth tends to stay closer to what it already knows. What determines whether it actually happens is more mundane: custody arrangements, governance, liquidity needs and the size of drawdown the mandate can carry.Gold provides thousands of years of history and physical ownership, while Bitcoin offers portability, transparency and global accessibility. From an institutional risk-management perspective, which asset is currently easier to own, secure and manage?Ivan Lee: Gold is easier to govern because its ownership, custody and stress behaviour are already familiar to every risk committee. It carries its own frictions. Vaulting, insurance, transport, assay and chain of title all have to be managed, and gold is straightforward to hold right up until the moment you need to move it. An exchange-traded product removes much of that operational burden and introduces an intermediary in its place.Bitcoin is the easier asset to move and trade across time zones, and its transaction history is transparent at the network level. Institutional custody has improved considerably: qualified custodians, segregation and multi-party controls. Key management, cyber security, legal finality and regulatory treatment still demand specialist controls. There is no universal winner here. The easier asset is whichever one your existing control framework already understands.One of the key challenges associated with both assets is custody. Gold requires secure storage and transportation, while Bitcoin presents private key management and cyber security risks. How do professional investors assess these risks today, and has institutional infrastructure meaningfully reduced concerns around digital-asset custody?Ivan Lee: Serious investors assess custody as a chain of controls: segregation, approval workflows, disaster recovery, insurance, auditability, legal enforceability, counterparty exposure and the ability to liquidate under stress. For gold, that means the vault, title and reconciliation. For Bitcoin, it means key-generation ceremonies, multi-signature or multi-party controls, access governance, cyber response and the treatment of client assets if a custodian fails.Infrastructure has lowered the barrier meaningfully. The underlying risk remains. The question has shifted from whether an institution can hold Bitcoin safely at all to which controls and legal arrangements are sufficient for a particular mandate. That is a more mature question, and digital custody still warrants the same scrutiny as every other link in the chain.Gold has long served as a high-quality form of collateral in global finance. As asset tokenisation expands and major institutions explore digital assets, how close are we to seeing Bitcoin achieve similar status in global lending, financing and prime brokerage markets?Ivan Lee: It is closer than most people assume. Bitcoin is already financeable. We and others lend against it every day, with conservative haircuts, live margining and liquidation processes built for a market that trades continuously. In some respects, the collateral mechanics are ahead of the traditional equivalent, since settlement and margining happen around the clock and never wait for a banking calendar.The remaining gap is regulatory and legal. Capital treatment, enforceable security interests across jurisdictions, rehypothecation rules and depth of liquidity in a fast drawdown all have further to travel. Tokenisation improves how an asset is represented and transferred, and it leaves the quality of the underlying asset untouched. Bitcoin will earn collateral status through repeated performance under stress.Bitcoin's volatility has moderated as institutional participation has increased and derivatives markets have matured. Does this evolution make Bitcoin more attractive to long-term investors, or does it diminish the asymmetric upside that originally attracted market participants?Ivan Lee: Both effects are real, and they come from the same source. Deeper spot and derivatives markets make Bitcoin easier to access, size and hold. They also arbitrage away the dislocations that used to produce spectacular short-term returns. Institutional participation and thin-market repricing cannot coexist for long.The asymmetry has changed address. It now sits in adoption, monetary credibility and the migration of settlement on to digital rails over a longer horizon. The days of a market gapping overnight because nobody was quoting are largely behind us. A maturing options market also lets investors shape the payoff they want, with the exposure defined in advance. The trade-off is better liquidity, compressed easy returns and drawdowns that remain severe.Gold is traditionally associated with stability, while Bitcoin is often viewed as a higher-risk asset. As both asset classes evolve, how should investors interpret volatility within an allocation strategy rather than treating it solely as a measure of risk?Ivan Lee: Volatility measures how quickly a market changes its mind. The probability of permanent loss is a separate matter. The more useful questions are what is driving the move, how the asset behaves when liquidity is scarce, how quickly it can be sold, and whether the position can be held through a drawdown without being forced out. A quiet asset can still carry concentration, counterparty or inflation risk. Inflation is the one investors most consistently underestimate.That is why the two are sized differently. Gold can play a core diversifying role. Bitcoin is usually a smaller, higher-risk allocation where the volatility is the exposure itself. The question worth asking is whether that volatility is compensated and survivable for the mandate.Looking ahead over the next three to five years, under what macroeconomic conditions would you favour gold over Bitcoin, and under what conditions would Bitcoin be the more compelling investment?Ivan Lee: Gold has the stronger case in an acute flight to quality: geopolitical escalation, a financial-system shock, a sharp deleveraging, or a period of rising real yields and a rising dollar while investors are cutting risk. Its record in those conditions is long, and it is embedded in official reserves and traditional collateral systems.Bitcoin's case strengthens over longer horizons and around a different set of concerns: monetary credibility, fiscal sustainability, restrictions on capital mobility and the need for an asset that travels. It is more compelling when regulation and custody are clear, spot demand is persistent, and the move is not being carried by leverage. I would treat all of this as scenarios worth recognising. None of it is a price forecast.Which catalysts are likely to have the greatest impact on the long-term outlook for both assets: central bank policy shifts, sustained inflation, regulatory developments, geopolitical fragmentation, or something else?Ivan Lee: They all matter, through different channels. For gold, real yields, the dollar and central-bank policy dominate the near term, with official-sector buying and geopolitical fragmentation reinforcing strategic demand. For Bitcoin, regulation, institutional access, spot flows and the credibility of market infrastructure carry as much weight as the macro backdrop.The variable underneath all of them is confidence: in monetary policy, in intermediaries, in legal ownership and in the ability to move value when it counts. No single policy announcement will settle this. The more durable signal is whether demand persists after leverage has washed out, and whether each asset keeps performing its intended role across different regimes.For investors currently holding both gold and Bitcoin, what specific macroeconomic or market indicators should they monitor when deciding whether to hold, increase exposure or rebalance their positions?Ivan Lee: I would keep an eye on a broad range of indicators. On the macro side: real yields, the dollar, the shape and volatility of the Treasury curve, inflation expectations, central-bank gold purchases and the direction of geopolitical risk. On the Bitcoin side, the market says more about itself than any commentator can: spot ETF flows, the balance of spot versus derivatives participation, funding, open interest, futures basis, implied volatility and downside skew. Those help separate genuine demand from a leveraged move dressed up as one.Rebalancing should be driven by the mandate: target risk, horizon and liquidity needs. If a position has outgrown its approved risk budget, or the reason it was bought no longer holds, that is a reason to act. I would be slow to act on a single day's correlation or a round number on a screen.Looking 10 years ahead, do you expect gold to maintain its position as the dominant global store of value, or could Bitcoin establish itself as an equal alternative alongside it? Why?Ivan Lee: Gold will very likely remain the dominant traditional store of value. History, physical properties, official-sector use and generations of portfolio precedent are not displaced in a decade. Bitcoin can still establish itself as a serious alternative alongside it, particularly for holders who value portability, transparent supply and native digital settlement.I would avoid assuming that one has to replace the other. They rest on different trust models and solve different operational problems. Bitcoin's standing in 10 years will depend on adoption, regulation, custody, market resilience, and whether it stays relevant in risk-off conditions as well as risk-on conditions. Coexistence looks like the more realistic base case.If you could allocate fresh capital to only one of these assets for the next decade, would you choose gold or Bitcoin, and what would be the single most important reason behind that decision?Ivan Lee: There is no honest answer without a mandate attached, and I would be wary of anyone who offers one. If the objective is capital preservation and crisis liquidity, gold's behaviour is the better established. If the objective is long-term monetary optionality and exposure to digitally native settlement, Bitcoin offers a wider distribution of outcomes, in both directions.Pressed on a general institutional portfolio, I would take gold on grounds of certainty. Its role in stress is well understood, and that is the whole of the reasoning. Bitcoin may well outperform over a decade. In practice, the choice is rarely binary, and sizing matters more than selection.If a young investor were building a portfolio today, how would you think about the ideal allocation between traditional safe-haven assets such as gold and emerging digital assets such as Bitcoin?Ivan Lee: I would resist offering a universal percentage. The first priorities are emergency liquidity, diversification across productive assets and an honest view of the horizon and the drawdown one can genuinely tolerate. Gold can play a stabilising role. Bitcoin, if held at all, belongs as a higher-risk satellite position, sized well below cash and core holdings.The real test is behavioural. Could you hold the position through a severe drawdown without being forced to sell, and do you understand the custody and regulatory arrangements around it? If the answer to either is no, the position is too large. The right allocation is the one that keeps you invested across several cycles.Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of Ivan Lee, Head of Trading at QCP, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Emirates 24/7. The content is provided for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment, financial, legal or tax advice. Readers should conduct their own research and seek independent professional advice before making any investment decisions.
