Morgan Stanley has made formal allocation recommendations for Bitcoin while leaving the door open to holding BTC on its balance sheet.
In an interview at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference, Amy Oldenburg, who leads the Digital Asset initiatives at the bank’s emerging markets equity division, says Morgan Stanley has made its BTC allocation position clear to clients.
“We have made recommendations on allocation to Bitcoin. We’ve announced allocation recommendations to Bitcoin of 2% to 4%.”
On April 8th, Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM) launched MSBT, making it the first US bank-affiliated asset manager to offer a crypto ETP. Data from the “deanonymizing” crypto transactions platform Arkham shows that MSBT currently holds 2,334 Bitcoin worth $176.5 million.
Oldenburg also notes that actual advisor-directed exposure remains limited, with the vast majority of Bitcoin ETP activity on the firm’s wealth platform being driven by clients themselves rather than by advisor recommendations.
“80% of that is self-directed. So the advisors are still very limited in their exposure to allocating to Bitcoin at this point.”
On the more consequential question of whether Morgan Stanley could eventually hold Bitcoin directly on its own balance sheet, Oldenburg says it is within the realm of possibility, tying any such move to the continued progress of the regulatory environment.
“I think if we continue to see the progress that we’ve made over the last 16 months or so in regulatory, that’s something that you may see going forward. It’s not totally out of the question.”
Bitcoin is trading at $75,739 at time of writing, flat on the day.
Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash
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