CoinShares puts the computer in the driver’s seat for crypto traders

CoinShares is introducing an automated trading product for private crypto investors, targeting a market niche that is not well served by robo-advisors.

The platform, called HAL, connects to users’ preferred exchanges and then automatically executes their chosen trading strategies. Their trading bots are active at all times and take positions on a daily, hourly or weekly basis. CoinShares’ strategies trade in bitcoin, ethereum, BNB, matic, XRP, cardano, solana, bitcoin cash and dogecoin. The service costs $19.90 a month and can be canceled at any time. The product is marketed in the EU and the UK, although the digital asset investment company does not restrict users based on nationality or residence, with the exception of those who live in countries sanctioned by the Financial Action Task Force. It basically offers four quantitative styles:

• Smart, daily trend followers that only last a long time and are designed to become neutral when prices fall. These operate on a time horizon of days or weeks.
• Pulse, which is an hour long-short trend following approaches that can profit from price increases and decreases over a trading horizon of just one hour.
• Artificial Intelligence Pick, a multi-coin strategy that trades bitcoin and ether on hourly or daily signals, and relies on neural networks to make decisions. The network is looking for the best approach over the next 24 hours.
• Dynamic, a low volatility absolute return product that mixes multiple strategies.

Thematic index strategies are also planned.

A spokesman for the company says so Forbes that each user’s strategy would have its own behavior so that the product would not distort the market with many customers taking similar positions that could be exploited to their disadvantage. The company itself promises not to front-drive the strategies it offers. HAL is CoinShare’s first consumer-facing service, before which the company focused on offering crypto trading products to institutional and professional investors. One advantage is that CoinShares’ platform actively trades around the clock, which is useful in the 24-hour crypto world. The product is non-custodial but executed on behalf of a user through their exchange.

“Now we are reaching out to people who are already inside the crypto ecosystem and already enjoy trying to play with the ecosystems themselves, but need some help to navigate in a better risk-adjusted way the volatility of this market,” says Jean-Marie Mognetti, CEO CEO of CoinShares.

“It’s for all consumers who have an exchange account with an exchange in Europe who want to be able to have a slightly more risk-based approach to their trading environment,” Mognetti said.

Last year, CoinShares acquired French fintech Napoleon Group, a company that offers a similar service to HAL. Napoleon was already integrated with leading exchanges including Binance, Bitfinex, Bitmex, FTX and Bitstamp and gives CoinShares a pre-established customer base. Napoleon Asset Management also holds a license under the EU directive on alternative investment fund managers. The license enables the British company to distribute its products across Europe after Brexit.

CoinShares generated $14.4 million in revenue in the second quarter of the year, but posted a $100,000 loss after taking a $17.7 million hit from liquidating the company’s Terra holdings after the algorithmic stablecoin collapsed.

Robo-advisors have quickly gained traction since they were introduced a decade ago. Charles Schwab, a financial services company with its own robo-advisory product, predicts that $460 billion worth of assets will be managed by robo-advisors by 2022. However, traditional automated advisors have been slow to offer crypto products given the volatility of the assets , leaving room for crypto-native firms like CoinShares to fill the gap.

In February, American automated investment platform Betterment entered crypto by acquiring Securities and Exchange Commission-registered crypto investment advisor Makara. In announcing the purchase, Betterment said the addition of crypto services would further “differentiate” the company’s product line. Other advisors, such as Wealthfront and SoFi, offer exposure to bitcoin and ether, but do not have automated crypto products.

“We’ve been able to navigate several bear markets successfully,” Mognetti said. “At the end of the day, people tend to trust people who stand by them for the long haul, so CoinShare is one of those entities in the crypto ecosystem that has been there for a very, very long time and we will continue to be there for a very long time. , a very long time.”

HAL stands for heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, which is what the company aims to offer with its quantitative strategies. But CoinShares is aware that it was also the name of “an ambivalent” computer character in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The movie character was a “computer that controls every automated facet of this mission to a singularity of unknown origin on a moon of Jupiter, and HAL knows everything,” said a spokesman, and in parallel, “our strategies are automated, control everything and monitor the market in real time. With HAL, you no longer have to worry about your trades.”