
Charles-Edouard Bilbault
Global Equities Portfolio Manager
In April, decorrelation between digital assets and the broader equity markets increased significantly, as investors searched for diversification assets. Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw record inflows of US$936m invested on a single day and net monthly inflows into digital assets products reaching US$2.4bn1. On regulatory front, new SEC Chair nominated by Donald Trump in January, Paul Atkins, was confirmed by the Senate this month. Prior to heading the SEC, Paul Atkins served as SEC commissioner and helped set up best practices in the digital assets sector.
Capital market activity also kept accelerating this month on this sector, as overall environment and regulatory framework is getting significantly more supportive. Tether, SoftBank and Cantor Fitzgerald backed new company, Twenty One successfully listed and oversubscribed. Core portfolio company Galaxy Digital’s Nasdaq listing was approved and expected on May 16th after a shareholder vote on May 9th, after more than three years of application process and nine rounds of comments with the public agency, including seven during previous administration. Stablecoin leader and portfolio company Circle who officially filed for IPO last month reportedly received an unsolicited takeover offer by Ripple, which Circle declined. On innovation front, April was very active as well, namely with BNY launching new blockchain accounting tool to facilitate tokenized funds administration with BlackRock as first client, Charles Schwab preparing to offer spot Bitcoin trading or Morgan Stanley reportedly integrating crypto trading on E*Trade.
In this context, the fund rebounded from April 8th lows and outperformed over the month, while broader equity market showed negative performance over the period. Unsurprisingly, performance was led by Digital assets/Fintech portfolio bucket, pulled up by Galaxy Digital and Coinbase. Audit trail/Industrial use cases’ contribution comes second, positively lifted by Palantir and SES AI. Blockchain infrastructure contribution was also positive with Cleanspark bounce-back.
We remained disciplined and took advantage of early April lows to purchase then underperforming companies like Galaxy Digital, Cleanspark and Coinbase and took some profits on Galaxy Digital at the very end of April. At the end of the month, our equity exposure was 93.2%2.
Sony’s Soneium blockchain to offer tokenized Treasuries, private credit via Plume.
ING is working on a stablecoin, as have other large banks like JPMorgan and Société Générale.
Morgan Stanley reportedly plans to introduce crypto trading on E*Trade.