Renaissance Technologies, the world’s top performing hedge fund has received permission to trade Bitcoin futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). Jim Simons, the founder of the fund is known as “the man who solved Wall Street”.

His top performing fund, Medallion, has returned over 66% in annual returns (before fees) for three decades. This year, despite the black swan event, the fund is up over 24% after fees and they may be on track for a record-breaking year.

Entry to Bitcoin trading

In late March of this year, RenTec had listed Bitcoin futures as a potential investment vehicle for the fund in a filing with the SEC.

The latter stated: "The Medallion Funds are permitted to enter into bitcoin futures transactions, which Renaissance will limit to cash-settled futures contracts traded on the CME. The underlying commodity for these futures transactions, bitcoin, is a relatively new and highly speculative asset. Bitcoin and futures based on bitcoin are extremely volatile, and investment results may vary substantially over time. These instruments involve substantially more risk and potential for loss relative to more conventional financial instruments. Investments of this type should be considered substantially more speculative and significantly more likely to result in a total loss of capital than many other investments“.

Capital influx

The news itself was welcomed by a small rally in Bitcoin’s price which pushed it by 3%.  The net assets under management of Renaissance Technologies is over $110 billion (as of 2019). For perspective, this is over half of the current cryptocurrency market capitalisation.

Of course, their allocation for this novel and volatile market will be much smaller, however seeing interest from top-performing funds that do not necessarily need to expand their horizons goes to show that crypto and Bitcoin are here to stay.