No doubt about it, the first quarter was tough for the financial world. No sector was exempt from the ill wind that blew off the Potomac.  At Algoz we have always believed you just have to make sure you are around to trade in the good days and whilst we are never pleased with drawdowns, statistically the ones we saw in Q1 2025, were about 30% less than we might have expected given the financial hand grenades that were being thrown every few days. This was thanks to the upgrades we made to all  of our strategies in November of 24. 

Enough talk about drawdowns, all of our strategies were positive in April and mid-way through May, they are all close to positive for the year, which is great news for our investors and not so for many of our competitors (The Barclays Crypto Hedge Index is down -15% YTD). I will cover strategy performances later in this piece.

Let’s look at some of the key data that shaped markets in April and some thoughts about the next couple of months. You may recall I put out some bullish sentiment back in mid-April when BTC was holding at $86,000, as our Algorithms were all showing green and I am pleased to say it has been a steady climb to back over $100K since that time.

• Macro liquidity with its 13 week lag time to crypto was yet again a spot on indicator of positive trading.
• Minting of stablecoins started to steadily increase during the month, always a good sign and necessary if we are to see a broader market rally.
• Ethereum, very over sold on low revenues, released their Pectra upgrade without a hitch and buyers liked the new low entry point driving that price up from $1600 towards $2500.
• Crypto Futures open interest climbed from $22 billion to $29 billion in late April, showering some more positivity on the market.
• The pincer movement of greater ETF inflows and stablecoin minting drove the BTC price through the $95K resistance and above $100K. Next target is to take out $106K. (Dont forget – no market goes in a straight line)
• FTX will start to distribute $7 billion to creditors, May 30th.
• S&P takes out it’s critical 200 day MA, is the trad-fi bear market over?
• US CPI data looks steady if not benign and whilst less cuts look possible in 2025 there is no doubt Chair Powell will choose his “dovish”words carefully in order not to antagonise his President unnecessarily.
• Zodia Custody (key Algoz partner) looks to buy Tungsten to strengthen its position in the UAE.
• Coinbase buys Deribit for $2 billion showing their commitment to the strengthening options markets.

Algoz also performed very well in April as we stepped back into bullish positions ahead of the buying and received yet more awards from Hedgeweek.

• Winning the Best New Solution Provider of the Year at the Hedgeweek Awards for our Custody Protection model that mitigates exchange and management counterparty risk was a major achievement. Our Group CEO Tal Teperberg was on hand to receive the award in London. To be recognised by the industry as a market leader in Crypto risk management was very gratifying. Quant Pro is the future of Crypto investment and this award proves that.  Click here for full story and quotes. 
• Further Big news is that our AUM has just gone through the $70 million mark and we are now on target to achieve our end of Q2 figure of $100 million under management, making us one of the major players in Crypto Asset management.
• In strategy performance, AiQP returned to lead the pack, up +4.4% for the month and as I write on the 12th May, is now up year to date as well. This flagship strategy is targeted for 35-40% net of fees annually with maximum 10% drawdown and has been on that track for the last 2 years.
• Market Neutral was small up at +0.4% and is also up YTD +4% currently, which is a very strong performance from this relative value proposition.
• Momentum also resumed winning ways up +4.8% and that too has just gone positive YTD after a strong start to May.

We have further major announcements coming up which I will share shortly. There are some significant results with our HFT strategy which is performing extremely well. More on this in next months newsletter.

You may not be aware we now run almost 50 SMA’s for our investors spread across 5 strategies, using USDT, ETH, BTC and XRP as a base asset. It is an amazing technical build by our team to ensure everyone gets filled simultaneously, without a pecking order, across the 5 exchanges we can use, all risk managed with a layered system to ensure early warning, with real time transparency for our investors. We have stress tested up to $250 million of capacity for each strategy without impairment and can deliver up to 500 SMA’s currently. It is an astonishing tech build achievement by our team and something of which we are rightly proud. 

Back in 2023 our aim was to create a Crypto Investment product that eliminated exchange and management counterparty risk for our investors – that we did with Quant Pro.

It was also to provide instant liquidity and total trading transparency and we have achieved that as well.

Algoz continues to lead the world in crypto asset management and trading and we have more goals but the most important one it to continue to generate yield for our investors in the safest, best way we know how. Back in 2016 when there were no Institutional Market makers in crypto, Algoz put its hand up to fill the void, Now some 9 year later we are still leading the way.