Scott Melker discusses Morgan Stanley’s (MS) E-Trade rolling out crypto trading, allowing users to trade bitcoin (BTC-USD), ether (ETH-USD), and Solana (SOL-USD).
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Morgan Stanley’s E*TRADE rolls out crypto trading. Wall Street’s push into digital assets continues. So listen, while we talk about markets and what Sailor does and trying to figure out what’s happening with legislation and regulation, the pipes are being laid by the biggest platforms on planet Earth to allow everyone access to crypto assets.
So, we’ve talked about the fact that this would be happening in the past. So we knew that this was coming, but it now has been launched. I have an E*TRADE account. I got the uh, I got the little alert that said you can now buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana on the platform.
This is through a partnership with Zero Hash, and I believe it’ll be 50 bips fees on these trades. So 0.5% on all of these trades.
So, what does this mean? So, listen, Morgan Stanley was largely out of the crypto space for a very, very long time, and I think made a splash a few months ago when they announced that they were launching a Bitcoin spot ETF.
because generally they are not an ETF issuer. But as I’ve told you on this show before, what Morgan Stanley was interested in was keeping the walls closed and not having capital flight out of their accounts.
So, why would they want to send their customers to buy a BlackRock spot ETF and pass that money on to BlackRock if they can do it themselves? They have tens of thousands of advisors and salespeople out on the streets who, even if they didn’t capture retail interest, they would be able to get the Morgan Stanley customers to stay within Morgan Stanley, buy that ETF, collect the fees and not pass them on.
But interestingly, you’ll remember that they came in with extremely low fees undercutting the entire market, meaning that they also wanted to compete for retail if the market ever ramped up again massively, which I think everybody in crypto believes it will do.
Well, now they’re following through with more plans here, relatively low fees for trading and making sure that those Morgan Stanley customers don’t exit and send their money over to Coinbase because we know that that money never comes back.
So, yes, it’s only Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, but we can assume that this is the beginning of a much broader trend of companies like this, we’ve seen it with Schwab that formerly did not offer crypto to their customers, wholesale offering crypto to their customers.
Now, interestingly, you cannot deposit and withdraw from the platform. So this is a very uh small ecosystem where you’re going to keep your assets, you know, they will be in a separate account, not FDIC insured from the securities that are in these accounts. So there are a lot of things here still to work through as to how it’s going to actually work.
But really, really big news. I think that the entire world now, if they didn’t have access before, they are getting access through all the accounts and platforms that they’re familiar with to be able to trade our beloved crypto assets.
