- Paul Tudor Jones owns $160 million in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF.
- The billionaire hedge fund investor upped his Bitcoin ETF holdings last quarter by five-fold.
- Hedge funds are buying Bitcoin ETFs as part of a popular trade known as the basis trade.
Paul Tudor Jones is a major bull for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The billionaire hedge fund investor owns about $160 million of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, IBIT.
That’s according to a filing from his Tudor Investment hedge fund.
The filing suggests that Tudor Investment is among the top 10 IBIT holders, according to Bloomberg data cited by the firm’s ETF analyst Eric Balchunas. The holdings come as Trump’s win reignites a Bitcoin investment strategy favoured by hedge funds: the market-neutral basis trade.
The strategy works when surging demand drives the price of Bitcoin futures higher than the price of the ETFs. Big funds like Millennium have also piled into Bitcoin ETFs, probably to seize on this trade. The difference between the two assets last week reached as high as 17%. That’s about as wide as when Bitcoin ETFs first launched in January.
Balchunas called Tudor Jones’ investment a net positive.
A “win for Bitcoin,” Balchunas posted on X on Monday. " The guy is smart and well-followed. He looked at all the options and thought an ETF was [the] best option for exposure.”
The filing comes as the underlying asset has rocketed to a new all-time high above $92,000 this month.
Bitcoin has been buoyed by Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections as market observers count on favourable crypto regulations under the new administration.
Jones is a long time Bitcoin proponent and identified the digital asset as a suitable hedge against inflation alongside gold in 2020. He has previously advocated investors allocating 5% of their portfolios to Bitcoin to diversify their holdings.
Still, his IBIT holdings are only 1.7% of his fund’s $9 billion in assets under management.
The 13F filings by investment managers this month also offer a glimpse into the biggest Bitcoin ETF holders in the US.
Wall Street behemoth Millennium is still the biggest Bitcoin ETF holder in the US. The New York-based hedge fund owns $1.9 billion in Bitcoin ETFs — about 2.4% of the firm’s $70 billion in total assets.
Other major Bitcoin ETF holders include Susquehanna, Horizon Kinetics, and Jane Street Group which indicates a strong appetite for the investment vehicle among hedge funds.
Bitcoin ETFs in the US have attracted almost $28 billion in investment flows since inception in January.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. To share tips or information about stories, please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.
