Traditional finance multi-strategy hedge fund firm Schonfeld Strategic Advisors is pushing into crypto products.
Schonfeld disclosed in SEC filings on March 29 investments in both bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) futures. A number of Wall Street firms have been investing in crypto for the first time, especially since regulated spot BTC ETFs have hit the US market.
Schonfeld, which has more than $10 billion of assets under management, has not taken the plunge into trading spot cryptocurrencies, however, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. The source was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive business dealings.
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Sticking to exchange-traded digital asset futures and ETFs has been a favored approach of a number of more buttoned-up asset managers wary of shifting SEC regulation over the sector.
urlIn its SEC filing, the New York-headquartered Schonfeld said that bitcoin and ether transactions would “initially” be limited to trading futures contracts that are listed on exchanges. Spot bitcoin and ether, or “the underlying commodities for those futures transactions,” are both “relatively new and highly speculative assets,” the filing said.
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Just Another Asset Class?
Even if the decision-makers at multi-manager operations — which divvy up capital between dozens of trading “pods” running unique strategies — lack long term conviction in crypto, they’re booking tidy short term profits.
A growing number of Wall Street’s buy-side vanguard, including Point 72 Asset Management and Brevan Howard, have expanded their maturing crypto operations in recent years. Millennium Management has also been known to trade bitcoin investment products.
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Conventional wisdom on The Street has held that select existing strategies can be ported to crypto futures and exchange-traded funds, aiming to exploit market discrepancies.
“They’re all just viewing it as another asset class that they can drop quant strategies on—nothing fundamental or really directional is my understanding,” the source said.
Representatives for Schonfeld, led by CEO and Chief Investment Officer Ryan Tolkin, did not return a request for comment. Schonfeld began as founder Steven Schonfeld’s family office.
The firm has since taken in billions of dollars of outside capital, which it deploys via internal and external trading teams into a wide range of strategies, including equities and global macro, plus a number of quantitative approaches.
