Key points
- Nine hedge funds and banks sold ETF shares equal to about 68,000 BTC between late 2025 and June, according to Decrypt's review of SEC filings.
- They were mostly unwinding an arbitrage trade whose returns had shrunk, not betting against bitcoin.
- Abu Dhabi's Mubadala and ADIC kept their BlackRock ETF positions, and other filers added about 20,000 BTC.
- The next round of quarterly filings, due in mid-November, will show the third quarter.
The investors who own U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs have changed. Hedge funds that once held large positions have sold, while sovereign wealth funds and wealth managers have held on or added, according to an analysis of quarterly SEC filings published by Decrypt on Oct. 29.
Hedge funds unwound a $5.4 billion trade
Nine hedge funds and banks sold ETF shares representing about 68,000 BTC from just before bitcoin's October 2025 high through the end of June, Decrypt reported, roughly $5.4 billion at current prices. Millennium, Brevan Howard, Goldman Sachs and D.E. Shaw led the selling.
Most of that selling was not a bet against bitcoin. Many of these firms ran a so-called basis trade: they bought ETF shares and sold bitcoin futures at the same time, pocketing the price gap between the two without taking a view on where bitcoin was headed.
That gap has narrowed. It offered about 7.9% a year before the October 2025 high and 4.8% by late October 2026, according to Decrypt. After fees and financing, Galaxy's Alex Thorn estimated the trade paid only about 1.5 percentage points more than Treasury bills, a thin reward for the effort. Futures positions on both sides of the trade shrank by about 57%, Decrypt said.
