Guru watch

Steve Cohen, founder, Point72 Asset Management

Billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen has just announced plans to invest in Radkl, “a quantitative-trading firm specialising in digital assets” including bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, reports Alexander Osipovich in The Wall Street Journal. Cohen is also joining the board at Recur, which focuses on “non-fungible tokens”, or NFTs – digital assets used to authenticate ownership of digital items.

“While the cryptocurrency market is now a $2trn asset class, we are still in the early stages of institutional adoption... As more professional investors enter this space, there’s a need for institutional acumen and a firm like Radkl,” said Cohen.

Yet the 65-year-old, who invested on his own account rather than via his fund, has only recently become a crypto convert. Cohen told attendees at the recent Skybridge Alternatives Conference that his son changed his mind, reports Bloomberg. “He really convinced me this was something I needed to do... Once I decided there were opportunities, and I thought this could be a space like the internet – it could be incredibly transformational – I wasn’t going to miss this.”

Cohen, who also owns the New York Mets baseball team, is also interested in the related concept of the “metaverse” – a threedimensional virtual world (or worlds) populated by individuals interacting via avatars (digital versions of themselves) who play games or trade digital goods and services. “There’s some farout ideas out there, about how people are going to spend their time.”