How This Crypto Hedge Fund Nailed the Trump Trade
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Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election by a landslide.
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Whereas polls indicated the race was a tossup, crypto hedge fund Lekker Capital went full-in on the Republican candidate.
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The fund’s founder, Quinn Thompson, told CoinDesk how he came about his non-consensus view.
Former President and now President-elect Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the U.S. election shocked many, but not Quinn Thompson.
The founder of crypto hedge fund Lekker Capital has been publicly bullish on Trump since at least mid-March and remained steadfast even as the market vacillated. He positioned his fund accordingly going into Tuesday's election — he bought solana {{SOL}} and bitcoin {{BTC}} miners involved with artificial intelligence — despite a multitude of polls claiming that the race was a toss-up or that Vice President Kamala Harris was in the lead.
The result? It has been Lekker’s most successful trade since the fund was launched six months ago, Thompson told CoinDesk. He declined to give exact numbers. SOL has surged 13% in the last 24 hours and isn't far from multi-year highs. AI-related bitcoin miners such as Core Scientific (CORZ), Hut 8 (HUT) and HIVE (HIVE) are up roughly 10% Wednesday, while BTC is soaring 8.7% and hit a new all-time high of $75,600.
“It's difficult for investors to take public stances because politics is such a divisive topic. Just like how it's taboo to talk about it with strangers,” Thompson said, before adding that herein lies the appeal of investing in a hedge fund that focuses on macroeconomics.
“People invest in macro-driven strategies because they are non-consensus by requirement,” Thompson wrote in a Wednesday email to his fund’s investors. “In order to get paid for being correct in macro, it requires going against the grain for long periods of time and developing conviction on ideas that at times strongly go against popular opinions.”
Trump won the Electoral College and popular vote, but that’s not all: Republicans now control the Senate and may well keep control of the House of Representatives — giving them the presidency and all of Congress. For Thompson, that’s a clear mandate for a socially liberal but fiscally conservative government — one that is bound to make life easier for the crypto sector after the impediments posed by current President Joe Biden as well as Trump during his first term. Trump reversed course on crypto this year, vowing to make the U.S. a crypto leader.