With Bitcoin down 15% in the month of April and the Barclay Hedge Crypto Index of Traders down almost 18% (as of May 3) it seems for most traders it was a difficult month. Not so Algoz, as our Momentum strategy was up 7.1% net of fees and our flagship AiQP strategy up almost half a percent on the month.

So what caused this BTC retreat and what can we expect going forward?

• There has been $1.1 billion of ETF outflow post the halving, which came and went without incident, many positioned themselves for that build up and then took profits.
• Actually since March 18, 58% of all trading days have seen ETF outflows.
• Keep in mind when BTC briefly traded below $57,300 last week that all ETF buyers, were effectively “underwater” with many stop losses set at 10%.
• Strangely in the absence of continued ETF purchases, BTC has been heavily influenced by Macro Economic events, the recent rally on dovish statements from the FED regarding interest rates, the most obvious.
• The other de-stabilising factor is, as we flagged up last month, the BTC miners now having to sell twice as much BTC to make the same profit and of course their operating costs to make a profit have now doubled due to the halving. For most break even is closer to $50,000 per coin than $25K as it was.
• Its also too early for the recent licenses granted in Hong Kong for Spot BTC and ETH to have any meaningful effect. 
• Interestingly it appears BTC is now the undisputed Store of Value after 17K of ETH were issued last week and only 6K burned, which is of course inflationary for the coin.

So in a mixed trading bag what were our highlights? As the Headline says ;

• Our Momentum strategy returning 7.1% net in April. This remodelled strategy is now showing far less drawdowns and proving itself to be a strong performer in all markets. Simulations for 2023 show it up over 100% net of fees – worth a look if you haven’t seen it for a while. (ask for a tear sheet)
• The AiQP strategy was up .4%, making it now up 14.3% net of fees and on course to deliver in line with the 50.9% net of fees in 2023.
• And the Award winning Market Neutral Strategy was up 5.6% in April as well. 
• Later this month we expect to announce a ground breaking partnership that will propel Algoz to the very top of the Crypto market place. Its a very exciting deal that we will share as soon as possible.

Our Algorithms were developed over 6 years of trading 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Equate that in hours to Nasdaq trading hours and days and it means we now have the equivalent of 32 years of data if we were trading Nasdaq hours. Thats a lot of data and the reason why our strategies have consistently performed so well in all trading conditions and why we won 3 Hedgeweek Awards for our trading in 2022, seen by many as the most difficult crypto trading year on record. 

One other interesting fact about Algoz is that in 2016 when we started in Crypto as a market maker, there was only us and a Chinese company acting as market makers. The Chinese company no longer exists, which pretty much makes us the longest serving Institutional crypto trader on record. I can’t categorically confirm that but research done to date suggests its pretty accurate.

All of that serves to strengthen my belief that with our Quant Pro product, that mitigates exchange and management counterparty risk, the protection that Zodia Custody gives you, in a way that no other in crypto currently can and our trading history, we are the logical choice to manage assets and get them earning for our investors.