Cambrial Capital to Shut Down After Coronavirus Tanks Markets: Sources

Cambrial Capital, a crypto-focused fund of funds, is quietly winding down its operations, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The fund, which holds between $6 million and $10 million in assets under management, appears to have fallen victim to the coronavirus crisis. March 12, aka “Black Thursday,” was the worst of it, driving bitcoin (BTC) prices down over 40 percent.

“We don’t talk about our products publicly given we’re regulated,” David Fauchier, Cambrial’s co-founder and chief investment officer, told CoinDesk. “We’d have to run any response through our [regulatory] umbrella and we’re a little busy right now.”

Launched in 2018 and regulated by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Cambrial Capital team includes Ha Duong, Edward Nelson and Alex Obadia. The two sources said Cambrial has an impressive and respected team in the industry, adding that the coronavirus “black swan” had brought with it an onslaught of margin calls.

A fund of funds is where a pooled investment is diversified across multiple other fund managers who specialize in a variety of strategies. Outfits like Cambrial include tactics such as arbitrage, market making, OTC trading, mean reversion and so on.

Given their diversification, these types of funds are sometimes called “market neutral.” But crypto investing of any kind is high risk and Cambrial is not the only trading business to be pushed over the edge during last month’s markets rout. 

Crypto hedge fund Adaptive Capital announced it was shutting down its fund and returning the rest of its capital to investors about a week after the crypto markets plunged in March.

However, some players in the crypto fund-of-funds space remain positive about the present opportunity.  

“Most investors can’t access the leading prop shops (Jump, Tower, Two Sigma, Brevan Howard, Jane Street) that do algo-trading on digital assets,” said Yuval Reisman, co-founder of crypto fund YRD Capital. “We allow access to the same strategies, many times, by investing in people that left these funds and launched their own fund.”