Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital Suspends Redemptions In One Of Its Crypto Funds

Voyager, 3 Arrows Capital, Celsius… is Skybridge Next?

Anthony Scaramucci’s Skybridge Capital suspended redemptions in one of its funds after sharp declines in stocks and cryptocurrencies, Bloomberg reported.

The Legion Strategies fund suspended redemptions because private companies, which are harder to sell, now make up about 20% of the portfolio, one of the people said. The fund is one of Skybridge’s smaller offerings, which farms out most of its roughly $230 million of assets to hedge fund managers. According to Bloomberg FTX, the crypto exchange co-founded by billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, is among the fund’s private investments.  

The Legion Strategies fund gained exposure to digital assets through other funds managed by Skybridge, including vehicles focused on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Algorand, according to a regulatory filing. As of Feb. 28, almost a quarter of Legion’s net assets were invested in such fund.

Scaramucci – who returned to money management after spending all of 11 days in the White House as the Trump administration’s communications director when he was angling for a nod from Trump to sell his firm to China’s now defunct HNA (the sale ultimately fell through) – made a big push into crypto, a move that helped Skybridge’s performance last year and has crushed it this year when an index of the 100 largest digital assets has tumbled 56% in 2022.  

Skybridge runs a larger fund-of-funds, the Multi-Adviser Hedge Fund Portfolios, which managed about $2 billion as of March 31, according to a separate filing. That fund fell about 5.5% for the year through March 31.

Redemptions for that fund are made through a tender offer by Skybridge. The firm told clients it will buy back 10% of the fund’s shares at the end of September, the next time investors are allowed to pull money, one of the people said.

It’s not the first time the Mooch has faced a run on his fund: in April 2020, Reuters reported that investors in SkyBridge Capital asked for hundreds of millions of dollars back after the fund suffered a 23% loss in March when investments made by its debt-focused hedge fund managers soured. Scaramucci wrote in a letter to clients that he was “embarrassed” by the loss.