How two crypto hedge funds dodged the market collapse
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Pythagoras’s arbitrage fund had a 10 per cent exposure to FTX before the exchange’s collapse.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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New York – The cryptocurrency market is undergoing one of its roughest stretches in memory, with trouble brewing at exchanges and lenders, and token prices collapsing. But one company has been able to ride out the volatility.
Pythagoras Investment Management has two funds that have been rare bright spots in a market that has been eviscerated by a number of scandals. Both its Market Neutral Fund – a strategy that does not have exposure to the price of any crypto at any time – and its trend-following Pythagoras Token Fund have each gained about 8 per cent this year, according to the company. Meanwhile, the world’s largest digital token Bitcoin is down around 60 per cent this year.
“We particularly outperform in bear markets,” Mr Mitchell Dong, chief executive of Pythagoras, said. “Our absolute-return funds are positive whether the market’s up or down – whether it’s a bull market, a bear market, we’re going to have positive returns.”
Pythagoras’s market neutral fund utilises arbitrage, meaning it is simultaneously buying the same crypto at different places and different prices, therefore buying low and selling high.
Meanwhile, its trend-following fund uses technical indicators to detect short-term trends in the crypto market, Mr Dong said.
The crypto market has been engulfed in scandals in recent weeks as Mr Sam Bankman-Fried’s once high-flying crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy, dragged down other companies.
Pythagoras’s arbitrage fund had a 10 per cent exposure to FTX before the exchange’s collapse. The company says it requested a full withdrawal of funds and received about 7 per cent, which spurred it to hedge by shorting the FTX’s native token FTT.
The FTX collapse spurred a plunge in cryptocurrency prices, with Bitcoin at one point dropping below US$16,000 – way off its highs of near US$69,000 just a year ago. The coin is now hovering around US$17,000.
Pythagoras’s fund strategies play off the fact that crypto, which is global and traded on numerous exchanges, is driven by retail investors, said Mr Dong.
“The idea is to use quantitative, technical indicators to try to detect trends, either up or down,” he said. “When you detect an upward trend, you go long when you think the psychology of people is that they think it’s going up. And when the trend is going down and everybody’s selling, you go short.”
Mr Dong, whose prior roles included running hedge funds for more than 25 years and trading uranium and electric power contracts, among other things, founded Pythagoras in 2014 after Bitcoin caught his eye.
“Buying and holding Bitcoin comes with 90 per cent drawdowns. That’s not my risk-return profile,” he said. “I want steady returns of 1 per cent to 2 per cent per month, with no losing months. That’s the target.”
Pythagoras is not alone, other market-neutral shops have also recorded positive returns this year. The strategy does not look as attractive during bull markets, when coins tend to see big upward surges, but in a bear market, they can stand out, traders say.
“The reason we can continuously produce returns is that crypto is a young and a very rapidly changing market,” Mr Dong said. “In crypto, every day is drama, and every week is an adventure. Every quarter there’s a paradigm shift and every year is a decade in traditional finance.” BLOOMBERG
