Maybe Journalists Need to Own a Little Bitcoin

"The days of bitcoin stunt journalism are over," writes Felix Salmon: "Today, if you write about bitcoin, you can't ethically own it, any more than you can own shares directly in companies you write about." This seems to be a consensus among journalists, but I wonder about it a little. If you don't have any bitcoins, doesn't that make you biased against it? After all, I do own stock in most of the public companies I write about, not "directly," but in the sense that they are in broad market indexes and most of my money is in broad market index funds. My exposure to the companies that I write about is not zero, it is instead a neutral amount: I own them in approximate proportion to their importance in the equity markets, and to my exposure to the equity markets.

It is hard to know what the "neutral" allocation to an asset is, but it seems reasonably clear that for prominent mainstream financial assets -- Apple Inc. stock, say -- it is not zero. If you had an otherwise normal healthy market-cap-weighted allocation to a diversified portfolio of U.S. equities, but zero exposure to Apple stock, then that would look a lot like a bet against Apple. You would be "underweight Apple" -- almost like being short Apple -- and your portfolio would do better, relatively speaking, if Apple went down than if it went up. If Apple went up a lot, you would be sad, because you made what is in effect a conscious decision to bet against Apple by having less than the neutral amount of it in your portfolio. If you were a journalist writing about Apple, that might, to some fastidious observers, create the impression that you were biased against Apple.