Barnali Biswal, CEO of Hilbert Group, joins Raghda Ibraheem as the digital asset investment firm, built around market neutral strategies after Barnali spent 14 years running high yield credit trading at Goldman Sachs, makes the case that the most consistently profitable approach to crypto does not require predicting which direction the price moves.
Her most striking data point is the one that stops the conversation: in 2025, market neutral crypto funds returned approximately mid-teens percentage. Directional funds lost about two and a half percent. Fundamental strategies fell more than 20%. The only consistently profitable category was the one that simply did not care about market direction.
On what institutions actually need to see before allocating to market neutral digital asset strategies at hedge fund scale, her answer is specific and grounded: a return stream that does not require a hot market, institutional plumbing including qualified custody and an independent administrator, an audited NAV, and a Sharpe ratio that has been through a few cycles — something they can actually take to a board or investment committee.