Hougan recently commented on Ethereum’s significant price recovery, noting a 53% rebound from its April lows and a 37% increase within a single week.
In drawing comparisons between today’s blockchain market and early internet adoption, Hougan pointed to how investment strategies from the early 2000s offer a relevant historical lesson. He referenced the example of 2004, when Google led the search engine industry and appeared to be the dominant bet on the internet’s future.
While Google became a highly successful investment, Hougan emphasized that other sectors, such as e-commerce (Amazon), video streaming (Netflix), and software-as-a-service (Salesforce), also generated substantial long-term returns.
This basket approach, he argued, is well-aligned with how general purpose technologies historically produce a range of winners across verticals.
To reinforce his perspective, Hougan pointed to performance data over the last five years for assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Chainlink—each demonstrating different periods of outperformance. Predicting which will lead through 2030 remains uncertain, and that uncertainty is exactly why he advocates diversification.
He concluded by citing a compelling statistic: over the past two decades, 97% of actively managed equity funds underperformed their benchmarks. For an industry as dynamic and unpredictable as crypto, the implication is that trying to identify individual long-term winners could be more difficult than many expect.
Featured image created with DALL-E, Chart from TradingView
