JPMorgan finally prices bitcoin — and still can't bring itself to call it a friend 🏦

JPMorgan has issued its first-ever range of long-term bitcoin return forecasts, projecting a base case of 10% annualized gains over the next decade and positioning BTC ahead of U.S. equities, bonds and gold in the bank's 10-year outlook. The figures appeared in the firm's 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions report released Tuesday.

Under that base case, bitcoin would deliver a 10% compound annual return, compared with projected 5.6% to 6.6% growth in U.S. bonds, 7.5% in U.S. large-cap equities, 7.7% in U.S. small-cap equities and 5.5% in gold. JPMorgan also set a bear case of a 9.7% annual loss and a bull case of a 17% annual gain for BTC, marking the first time the bank has published a defined range for the asset. At the time of reporting, $BTC traded at $81,462.69.

The New York-based bank tempered the forecast with a cautious stance, stating that bitcoin's "volatility and unstable correlation to other asset classes…remain an obstacle to [its] widespread inclusion in portfolios." Portfolio manager Dr. Sheena Shah and head of digital asset strategy Dennis Cristallo characterized BTC as a "speculative asset and a hedge against monetary easing" rather than a portfolio diversifier, adding that it "lacks a strategic role in portfolios other than as a bet on fiat currency expansion or future asset trading on blockchains."

The analysts further noted that "BTC mostly trades like a high beta risk asset that tracks global money supply growth, but it is sometimes treated as 'digital gold,'" and warned that "unstable correlations with other assets present a modeling hurdle" alongside the difficulty of "forecasting an asset whose fundamentals are not cash flows and whose economics may be as much about adoption, regulation and liquidity as technology."

The report arrives against the backdrop of JPMorgan's complicated history with cryptocurrency, shaped in part by CEO Jamie Dimon's longstanding skepticism. Dimon publicly described bitcoin as a "fraud" in 2017, a label he has since softened but not abandoned. Despite the new return range, the bank made no recommendation for clients to add bitcoin to strategic allocations.