Scaramucci’s SkyBridge halts withdrawals in one of its funds

Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital has frozen customer withdrawals in one of its funds, according to a Bloomberg report.

Sources said the investment manager’s decision to suspend client withdrawals is due to the market conditions that have seen stocks and cryptocurrencies crashed, with most assets deep in the red year-to-date.

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One of SkyBridge’s ‘smaller’ fund

The fund in question, according to the report, is the Legion Strategies. It’s one of the smaller funds run by SkyBridge Capital, and it ostensibly moved to halt customer redemptions after private companies composition of the portfolio hit 20%. Per the report, the Legion Strategies’ decision is apparently based on the fact that private companies “are harder to sell.” 

One of the private investments in the portfolio is billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX. Crypto exposure to the fund is via investment products focused on Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Algorand (ALGO).

As stocks and cryptocurrency prices fell in the first half of the year, downside pressure has impacted the investment manager’s offerings.

Scaramucci is a crypto proponent and has in the past predicted the price of Bitcoin would soar to see the digital asset topple gold. It’s against this backdrop that the Legion Strategies fund held nearly a quarter of its net assets in crypto in early 2022. However, with crypto mirroring the stock drawdown, that figure has dropped significantly to currently sit around just 10% of the portfolio’s investment assets.

The Legion Strategies manages nearly $230 million in assets, with a larger part of the dealings done with major hedge funds.