J.P. Morgan Asset Management has issued its first long-term forecast for bitcoin, projecting that the cryptocurrency will deliver a compounded annual return of 10% over the next decade. The figure appears in the bank's 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions, published on Oct. 19, and ranks above U.S. stocks, gold and real estate investment trusts.

The 31st edition of the annual report is the first to assign a range of return scenarios to bitcoin. Capital market assumption reports of this kind serve as reference inputs for long-term portfolio planning, which places bitcoin in the same framework institutions use to weigh stocks, bonds, gold and other holdings.

Bear case sinks to -11.2% as bull case hits 16.6%

Bitcoin's 10% base case is the highest return in a dedicated table JPMorgan built to compare it with 12 common investments, from stocks and bonds to gold and cash. The bank assigned 10-to-15-year annual return forecasts to four traditional investments: large U.S. companies at 7.5%, smaller U.S. companies at 7.7%, real estate investment trusts at 8.2% and gold at 5.5%.

Bitcoin's forecast exceeds large U.S. companies by 2.5 percentage points and gold by 4.5 points.

The 10% represents the base case. JPMorgan's analysis puts the bear case for bitcoin at a 10-year annualized return of -11.2% and the bull case at 16.6% — a 27.8-percentage-point spread between the two scenarios — based on a spot price of $83,000 as of Sept. 30. Within the model, bitcoin supply growth relative to money supply carries a 65% weighting, the gold-complement case 30%, and network adoption 5%.

A traditional 60/40 stock/bond portfolio carries a 7% annualized return, which the bank attributed to productivity gains from AI, corporate profitability and higher bond yields. The report spans more than 200 asset classes. Authors Dr. Sheena Shah and Dennis Cristallo described bitcoin (BTC) as the anchor of the crypto ecosystem, citing liquidity, longevity and improving regulatory clarity.

55% volatility shuts BTC out of main covariance matrices

JPMorgan pegged bitcoin's annualized volatility at 55%, roughly three times that of gold at 17.2% or U.S. large caps at 18%. The cryptocurrency's arithmetic average return works out to 20.9% per year, well above the compounded 10%, because compounded returns incorporate losses that erode subsequent gains — a gap driven by high volatility.

Bitcoin's volatility and unstable correlations kept it out of the bank's main covariance matrices, the models that measure how asset prices move together. Instead, JPMorgan constructed a separate, smaller matrix comparing bitcoin with a subset of assets. The bank said it could add bitcoin to its main models later, which would require calmer prices, steadier links to other assets, clearer rules and deeper markets.

BlackRock's IBIT recorded $665.16 million in inflows on Monday, Oct. 19, its highest single-day inflow since October 2025, as reported by Cryptopolitan. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs combined netted $526.6 million as bitcoin hovered between $82,000 and $83,000. The flows landed the same day the assumptions report was published.

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan welcomed the inclusion but said the 55% volatility estimate was too high given bitcoin's narrowing price swings over the last 15 years. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight at you, then they add you to Long-Term Capital Markets Assumptions paper and predict you'll be the best-performing asset of the next decade," he wrote on X. In his weekly memo, Hougan has explained that bitcoin wins on all economic outcomes, writing, "all of them lead to Bitcoin."

"Wall Street is doing the math," said Strategy Chairman Michael Saylor on X.

Given that dispersion between bull and bear outcomes, the bank said bitcoin exposures should be closely examined and that any portfolio holding the asset should be stress tested against bull and bear scenarios.