FAIRFIELD, Iowa, April 18, 2018 — BarclayHedge’s newest index, the Barclay Cryptocurrency Traders Index, dropped 29.2% in March. Year to date, the Index is down 43.1% after three consecutive monthly losses.
“Within days of the launch of Bitcoin futures, Bitcoin rose to its all-time high of just under $20,000 on December 18 last year. Today’s prices are just over $8,000. Folks have their opinions, but no one really knows if it’s a bubble or a correction,” said Sol Waksman, president and founder of BarclayHedge, the top provider of data on hedge funds and other alternative investments.
The Barclay Cryptocurrency Traders Index is an equal-weighted index of the monthly returns of a representative universe of 19 constituent funds that trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. BarclayHedge started the Index in 2018.
“Based on the knowledge gained from our 32 years of experience in collecting, compiling, analyzing, and indexing performance data from alternative investment funds, we wanted to minimize statistical biases which can distort historical index returns,” Waksman said. “We chose a January 2018 start date to avoid survivorship bias, backdating and selection bias."
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and its competitors enable secure, verifiable transactions that are extremely difficult to copy or counterfeit. Investments in the cryptocurrency sector exploded in 2017, leading to the December launch of trading in Bitcoin futures by CME Group (CME) and Cboe Global Markets (Cboe).
“The ability to trade Bitcoin futures on exchanges such as CME and Cboe, which are respected worldwide, provides a much-needed level of transparency, investor safety, and credibility to the price–discovery process and creates a level of institutional legitimacy that is crucial for growth in this sector,” Waksman said.
The Cryptocurrency Traders Index is the latest in a long line of BarclayHedge indexes tracking multiple sectors in the hedge fund and alternative investment universe. In addition to its 25 proprietary indices, BarclayHedge maintains 148 additional hedge fund indices for financial institutions in North America and Europe in its role as an independent index calculation agent.
Click here to view 37 years of Barclay CTA Index data.
Sol Waksman is the founder and president of BarclayHedge. Waksman is an industry expert and experienced media source, providing perspectives on hedge fund and managed futures trends.
BarclayHedge is the global leader in providing independent, research-based information services to the alternative investment industry. Founded in 1985, Barclay currently maintains data on more than 6,600 hedge funds, fund of funds, and CTAs. No one has been in the business of collecting alternative investment data longer than BarclayHedge.
Institutional investors, brokerage firms, and private banks worldwide utilize BarclayHedge indices as performance benchmarks for the hedge fund and managed futures industries.