Nickel Digital makes addition Goldman alumnus hire

Submitted 22/06/2021 - 9:55am

Nickel Digital Asset Management (Nickel), Europe’s largest regulated a digital assets hedge fund manager, has appointed Henry Howell, a Goldman alumnus with eighteen years of experience in hedge fund, derivatives, and electronic futures sales as Head of Business Development.

Prior to joining Nickel, Howell was with Eisler Capital, a London-based macro hedge fund. Before that, Howell spent sixteen years with Goldman Sachs in Chicago and London. As a Managing Director in the Prime Services business unit in London, Henry was the head of listed and OTC derivatives sales and the global head of electronic futures.

Launched in early 2019, Nickel Digital offers institutional-grade access to digital assets market and currently runs four crypto funds catering for various degree of investors’ risk tolerance, from market-neutral arbitrage to multi manager and liquid venture strategies. Nickel has seen its assets under management increase over 300 per cent in the past 12 months, with AUM now approaching the USD200 million mark. Its flagship Digital Assets Arbitrage Fund delivered 24 months of all-positive performance since inception, with solid double digits returns YTD and Sharpe ratio of 4.8.

Anatoly Crachilov, co-Founder and CEO of Nickel Digital, says: “We are absolutely delighted to welcome Henry to our actively growing team. From three founding partners 2 years ago, Nickel has now expanded into a team of 25 and I am specifically pleased to see a growing number of Wall Street professionals embracing the digital assets space, and another Goldman alumnus reinforcing Team Nickel. Henry brings an impressive 16 years of experience in top positions at Goldman, which will be invaluable to our ambitious roll out of investment offerings across the world.”  

Howell says: “As a specialised crypto asset manager, Nickel Digital are uniquely positioned in the rapidly evolving digital space. Nickel’s expertise, track record of risk management and dedicated infrastructure all combine to make it a trusted partner for institutional investors. I am hugely excited to be joining the talented team at Nickel Digital and helping to expand the business globally going forward.”

Nickel currently has four funds investing in the digital asset space. Its market-neutral Digital Asset Arbitrage Fund pursues an absolute return strategy without expressing directional views on the underlying cryptoassets market. It exploits market inefficiencies and price dislocations and harnesses swings of volatility to deliver consistent positive returns within a strictly defined risk management framework. Since inception 24 months ago, the fund has delivered strong risk-adjusted returns with no drawdown months and a Sharpe ratio above four. 

The Nickel Diversified Alpha (Digital Factors) Fund is a non-directional, multi-strategy fund which wraps a portfolio of attractive, hard-to-access and capacity-constrained strategies into a single, investible fund. Among the strategies it deploys are high-frequency market making, statistical arbitrage, relative value, volatility arbitrage and momentum.

Digital Leaders Altcoin (Liquid Venture DeFi) Fund is designed to capture the growth potential of the broader digital assets space by identifying the emerging technologies in Decentralised Finance, digital asset trading and decentralised applications. 

Nickel’s Digital Gold Institutional Fund, a bitcoin tracker, provides secure, efficient, transparent, and liquid access to physically allocated Bitcoin. It delivers institutional-grade precision of trade execution available on both weekdays and weekends with one of the industry’s lowest expense ratios.  

Finally, a new Defensive Bitcoin Fund is expected to be launched soon to cater to clients seeking partial downside protection to their bitcoin position, while still capturing the upside offered by the structural expansion of the digital assets space. 
 

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