Ruffer Investment Earned $650M in Profits From Bitcoin

Investment management firm Ruffer Investment Management sold a portion of its Bitcoin investment for millions of profit to keep a risk-free long position on the crypto asset.

According to a February 2nd report by UK news outlet The Telegraph, the investment manager has sold $650 million worth of bitcoin after the value of its holdings had more than doubled following its initial November investment. The firm's investment director Duncan MacInness admitted to being amazed at the speed at which the firm was able to turn a profit:

We’ve been surprised by how well it has done and how quickly. We did not expect immediate fireworks. [...] The 2.5pc allocation we made in November across all our funds, which totalled around $600m. This has more than doubled so we decided to take out our ‘book cost’ and take $650m in profits. We still have around $700m left in and are currently up by $750m overall.

In other words, Ruffer Investment Management was able to sell enough bitcoin to fully cover the initial position cost, while also maintaining exposure to the asset with the remaining funds. MacInness explained that the firm—which reportedly managed £21 billion ($29 billion) worth of assets at the end of 2020—had been following Bitcoin's rise for years and used to be rather skeptical of it during the 2017 bull run.

MacInnes believes that Bitcoin's appreciation throughout the last year hit different than three years prior, citing the impact of an uncertain economic environment through the rise of negative interest rates and bond yields, an ongoing war on cash caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and also other factors, such as digitization:

Everything is going digital – our lives are far more digital than a year ago. [...] There are now proper regulated institutions buying in too. People are desperate for alternative safe haven assets and Bitcoin is like a digital gold. [...] We are at the foothills of a long upward trend in its institutionalisation.

MacInnes' remarks strike a note with the ideas recently expressed by Tesla CEO and the world's richest person Elon Musk. As BTC Times reported on Monday, Musk commented on audio chat platform Clubhouse that "Bitcoin is on the verge of getting broad acceptance by the conventional finance people."