Brevan Hire, T3 News Provides More Evidence of Institutional Interest in Crypto
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: January 31, 2022
As the crypto world looks for evidence of growing institutionalisation, it would have been heartened by three snippets of news over the past couple of days.
As reported by The Full FX, multi-asset class data and analytics firm BestX has added crypto to its stable of products, and in addition Brevan Howard has reportedly made a senior hire to its BH Digital unit and index provider T3 says a pension fund has traded one of its crypto volatility products.
Sources confirm reports that Peter Johnson, partner at Jump Capital, has left the firm to join hedge fund giant Brevan Howard’s BH Digital unit, as a portfolio manager. The hire is part of Brevan’s plan to beef up its investing in digital assets, first announced last year with the establishment of BH Digital as a formal entity. Johnson spent just over nine years at Jump, as he led the firm’s crypto and fintech investments programme, prior to which he worked briefly at Morgan Stanley in the Financial Institutions Group, having joined from a four-year spell as consultant at Deloitte.
Meanwhile, crypto index provider T3 says that an unnamed pension fund has recently traded an OTC 1 month BitVol vertical, to take advantage of low implied vols to establish a long vol position. T3 offers Bitcoin and Ethereum volatility indices, both of which are a measure of expected 30-day implied volatility.
After falling to 63.26 on January 20, its lowest level since October 2020, the BitVol Index bounced to 83.49 on January 24, before resuming a downtrend, closing out January at 71.83.
With Bitcoin hovering just above recent lows after its drop below $40,000 a few weeks ago, the market is at an interesting point, something that is highlighted in B2C2’s latest weekly report. While the crypto market maker says that price action is sideways, which it is, according to its flow data, banks and crypto exchanges (the latter largely being retail-orientated) have largely been buyers, while family offices have been on the seller side of the ledger. In what may be troublesome news for the pension fund long the T3 BitVol Index, B2C2 says put skews “held up better than vols towards the end of the week, with longer dated risk reversals also catching a bid”.