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Oct 22 Oct 24 Oct 26 Oct 28 Oct 29 $82.0k $81.2k $80.4k $79.6k 24h High High $81,840 24h Low Low $79,636 Vol Vol $1.3B → Buy Bitcoin with USDT Powered by Jupiter $ 50 $ 100 $ 500 Buy Price data by CoinGecko CoinGecko More Bitcoin news and projections → Hedge Funds Left the BTC ETF Trade and Sovereign Wealth Stepped In Every quarter, big institutions have to tell the SEC what they own. Add up those filings from just before Bitcoin’s October 2025 high through the end of June, and the picture is clear: nine hedge funds and banks sold about 68,000 Bitcoin worth of ETF shares over those nine months, roughly $5.4 billion at today’s prices. Millennium, Brevan Howard, Goldman Sachs, D.E. Shaw and five others led the selling. Some trimmed by a third. Some sold everything.
The trade had nothing to do with believing in Bitcoin . You buy the ETF, you simultaneously bet against Bitcoin in the futures market, and you pocket the gap between those two prices. Done right you make money whether Bitcoin rises or falls—as long as the gap beats what you’d earn just parking the cash in Treasury bills.
Before the high, that gap paid 7.9% a year, a full 3.9 points better than T-bills. By late October it paid 4.8%, barely half a point better. After fees and financing, Galaxy’s Alex Thorn figures what’s left is about 1.5 points over cash. Not worth the trouble.
“That arithmetic, not the price, is why the multi-strategy desks left,” he wrote.
You can see it in the futures data too. Both sides of that trade shrank by nearly identical amounts, around 57% each.
Now look at who came in and bought. Morgan Stanley’s wealth management arm. Mubadala. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council. Roughly 2,200 other filers added about 20,000 Bitcoin between them. Hedge funds sold; sovereign funds and wealth managers bought. And the investors too small to file at all—advisers, family offices, regular people—cut their holdings by just 6.6% while the price fell 49%. So Middle America is hodling.
That’s the whole story. The people who were never really Bitcoin investors left. The people who were didn’t flinch.
Since June, the funds have added back 87,000 Bitcoin—this time as straightforward buying, not arbitrage.
The rate picture is turning too. The Fed held Wednesday, but December has quietly softened: a month ago traders put 59% odds on two rate hikes by year-end. Today that’s zero. Expected tightening has been cut roughly in half. Less tightening helps every risk asset.
October’s flows already show the shift. The month was down $907 million at the midpoint. Through Tuesday it’s essentially flat, with $724 million arriving in just the last eight sessions.
The fast money is gone. The believers are left. And that’s the foundation you can build on for a bull market rally…
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