(Reuters) – Anthony Scaramucci’s agency SkyBridge Capital is the most recent conventional fund supervisor to launch a bitcoin-focused fund after a surge of curiosity in cryptocurrencies in 2020.
Scaramucci, who beforehand served a brief stint as U.S. President Donald Trump’s communications director, joins Paul Tudor Jones here and Britain’s Ruffer Funding Administration in embracing the nascent asset.
Regardless of the rising institutional acceptance of bitcoin, it stays extremely unstable, topic to patchy regulation and seen by most main buyers as extremely dangerous.
SkyBridge, a fund of hedge funds, on Monday introduced it had began the Skybridge Bitcoin Fund with $310 million in belongings beneath administration invested from its $3 billion flagship fund.
“Think about each mannequin portfolio the place gold has turn into an accepted asset class, each mannequin portfolio has a 1% publicity to bitcoin and you may see the magnitude of the place bitcoin may very well be,” SkyBridge founder and managing accomplice Scaramucci informed Reuters.
Skybridge’s crypto transfer comes amid a rally within the value of bitcoin and different digital currencies. Bitcoin nearly quadrupled in 2020 and ended the 12 months on a excessive.
Bitcoin continued its record-smashing rally piercing $30,000 for the primary time on Saturday, and surging above $34,000 on Sunday.
Cryptocurrency-focused hedge funds made positive factors of 52% in November, bringing year-to-date returns to 156%, in response to trade tracker Hedge Fund Analysis (HFR).
“After posting sturdy positive factors by way of the tumultuous 2020, buyers are actively rising publicity to hedge funds, together with cryptocurrency methods,” mentioned Kenneth Heinz, President of HFR, in a launch on Wednesday.
Nevertheless, information from eVestment exhibits searches for cryptocurrency hedge funds on their database made up simply 0.14% of all hedge fund searches in 2020.
Earlier this 12 months, SkyBridge buyers requested for $1.7 billion again after its foremost fund suffered a 23% loss in March when investments made by its debt-focused hedge fund managers soured.
Scaramucci informed Reuters the fund had since recovered a few of its losses and was down 7.5% by way of the 12 months and it raised one other $300 million.
Reporting by Maiya Keidan, extra reporting by Tom Wilson in London and Anna Irrera in New York; modifying by Megan Davies, Nick Zieminski and Diane Craft
