Hedge Fund That Loves Bitcoin Unfazed by Surge Toward $6,000

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Bitcoin-focused hedge fund BitSpread Limited isn’t interested in the price of the cryptocurrency, even as it soared close to the $6,000 mark this week. Instead, the firm is looking at something else: the price disparity between the exchanges that sell bitcoin. 

“We’re not interested in the price of bitcoin — high or low,” said Cedric Jeanson, the former JPMorgan Chase & Co. trader who started Bit Spread, which manages more than $25 million. “We’ll buy bitcoin versus the yen if the price is high, while simultaneously selling bitcoin versus the U.S. dollar if the price is low.”

What the firm is really interested in is the price differences between the big exchanges that have sprung up, such as Gemini and itBit. BitSpread gained 80 percent this year through September, boosted by market making on exchanges in Japan and Korea, which have experienced a “surge of interest in digital currencies” after the countries legalized bitcoin use, Jeanson said in an interview. “There is incredible momentum around the world now to access blockchain networks, either as an investment or value transfer.”

That surge of interest has produced more flow for the fund, which continuously buys and sells bitcoin among exchanges without taking a position on the digital currency. “It’s not just across exchanges, but intra-exchanges,” Jeanson said. “We can buy from one and sell it back to the same one.”

Price Bubbles
This approach has advantages and disadvantages. While betting on the price differences between exchanges may mean the fund is less exposed to bubbles, it may also mean smaller gains when bitcoin is surging.

Cryptocurrency hedge funds on average jumped 535 percent in the first nine months of the year, according to Eureka hedge, beating the almost 500 percent rise in the price of bitcoin. This follows returns of 106 percent last year for these funds, 69 percent in 2015 and a 52 percent plummet in 2014, according to the Singapore-based data provider. Hedge funds on average have risen 5.6 percent this year.

Eureka hedge’s index includes pools that employ a variety of trading strategies to profit off price movements in the underlying digital currencies, including arbitrage, event-driven, momentum and shorting on a limited scale given liquidity constraints.

Funds like BitSpread earn money on price differentials, rather than the price of the asset itself, which creates less exposure to market movements, such as a potential plunge if there’s a bubble. The price of bitcoin was at about $5,650 on Tuesday, close to its record high after being spurred by greater acceptance of the blockchain technology that underpins the exchange method.

But it’s volatile. In September, bitcoin plunged 30 percent in two weeks as buyers weighed the impact of a Chinese ban on initial coin offerings and domestic trading in virtual currencies.

‘A Fraud’
The digital currency’s rise this year has left people divided, with some questioning the market’s viability. While some of his colleagues have been more accepting of bitcoin, JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon, who has called the cryptocurrency “a fraud,” said last week that anyone who buys it is “stupid.”

Hedge-fund manager Kyle Bass recently said a “whole bunch of people are going to lose a lot of money” in the crypto “mania.” Others like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are exploring ways to help clients trade cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

One of the largest of a growing group of investors looking to access bitcoin is former Fortress Investment Group LLC trader Mike Novogratz, who is said to bestarting a $500 million hedge fund to invest in cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings and related companies. There are at least 75 funds investing in the space, according to Autonomous Research.

Opportunity for Change
BitSpread trades 11 of the 200 major bitcoin exchanges including Gemini and itBit, both based in New York, and Coinbase, a digital currency wallet and platform in San Francisco. The firm trades bitcoin, bitcoin cash and ether, the cryptocurrency token used on the Ethereum network.

BitSpread’s Jeanson is cautious about initial coin offerings, saying they are often “very early stage” and usually require an early investment to get a bonus discount prior to public sale. “We do not like those,” he said in an interview last month.

Jeanson launched London-based BitSpread with partner capital in June 2014. The firm, which also has offices in Singapore, Paris, New York, Cayman and San Francisco, has received commitments from investors that will bring assets to $50 million by year-end and $200 million by the end of 2018, he said.

Jeanson, whose background is in equities and fixed-income derivatives, sees bitcoin as an opportunity for change that hasn’t come around since the early days of the internet.

“This is a network of the people, run by people and accessible by the people,” he said. “This is an internet type of disruption — a fantastic disruption.”

Source: Bloomberg Business News