After all, the cryptocurrency’s most vocal advocates nowadays aren’t plugged-in millennials but the hedge fund world’s baby boomers and Generation X-ers — Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones — backing Bitcoin as the juice their global macro trade playbooks need. As an industry, hedge funds could use the help: While November saw them post their best collective performance for six years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, that still wasn’t enough to match returns available from benchmark equity indexes. As a specific strategy, global macro funds lagged their peer group, the stock market and the returns from the global bond market.
Bitcoin is the ideal holiday gift for an underperforming hedge fund manager. Just ask SkyBridge Capital’s Anthony Scaramucci, who is diving in after his fund of hedge funds posted its worst annual performance since 2008. That’s unlikely to be a coincidence.
Whatever one’s misgivings about the sustainability of the cryptocurrency’s price rally — it has doubled in one month to a US$35,000 ($46,168) record — it’s a happier tale to tell the market than the bad structured-credit bets that saw SkyBridge clients ask for their money back. At around US$40 million, this crypto bet looks like a fig leaf next to the firm’s overall assets of US$7 billion, but one in tune with the times.
