London-based digital assets hedge fund manager Nickel Digital Asset Management (Nickel) achieved a record net annual return of 34.9% in 2024 for its systematic Diversified Alpha Fund, according to data from BarclayHedge.

The fund is a non-directional multi-strategy vehicle, which wraps a portfolio of attractive but hard-to-access and capacity-constrained digital asset strategies into a single, investible fund.

The return was the strongest performance in the four year history of the fund, which notably, gained 3.8% in December, despite bitcoin declining by 3% and ether by 10%, highlighting its uncorrelated nature.

Overall, the fund gained in 11 out of 12 months last year, including in each of the four months of 2024 when bitcoin posted negative performance.

Rolling 12-month volatility of the fund is 5.1%, less than 1/10th of the underlying digital assets market and the correlation with bitcoin is 0.06.

The 2024 net return on Diversified Alpha significantly outstrips the returns of 8.2% and 6.9% for the HFRX Equity Market Neutral Index (Flagship Funds) and the HFRI Multimanager Podshop Index, respectively.

The fund’s AUM increased by 150% last year, putting it on course to soft close in the coming months to protect the returns of existing investors.

Nickel Digital was founded in 2019 by alumni of Bankers Trust, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan to provide institutional-grade access to the digital assets market.