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Billionaire Michael Platt’s firm BlueCrest Capital Management has gained almost 15 per cent so far this year after making a series of bets on currency and bond markets, racing ahead of some of its prominent rivals.
The hedge fund turned family office made most of its money betting on reversals in US interest rates, the dollar, the pound and AI stocks, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The family office now has about 140 trading teams, according to the person.
Investors have endured a wild start to 2025 as President Donald Trump has twice threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on US trading partners before granting eleventh-hour reprieves.
While investors began the year optimistic about the US economy, public sector firings, a clampdown on immigration and the impact of Trump’s stop-start trade war have damped consumer confidence.
The dollar has weakened this year, reversing a rally sparked by Trump’s election victory, while the S&P 500 has underperformed indices in Europe.
The highly volatile market environment has created opportunities and pitfalls for hedge funds, with some rivals suffering a difficult start to the year.
Multi-manager hedge funds Millennium and Citadel were down about 0.8 and 0.3 per cent respectively to the end of February, while Balyasny was up 3.5 per cent.
The master fund of macro hedge fund firm Brevan Howard was down 4.45 per cent, while its Alpha Strategies fund was up 2.25 per cent.
The hedge fund firms declined to comment.
BlueCrest was once one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, but after a period of poor performance and investor withdrawals in the early 2010s, Platt returned capital to investors and opted to convert the firm into a family office in 2015.
At the time Platt said he could use more leverage under the new structure to boost returns while still paying his traders large profit shares. Since then, the firm has frequently notched up big gains.
BlueCrest has a similar set-up to multi-manager firms such as Citadel and Millennium, with independent trading teams across different asset classes and overseen by Platt.
In addition to bonds and currencies, BlueCrest trades commodities and has systematic strategies that involve computers making bets on markets using large amounts of data.
BlueCrest declined to comment.
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