From Decrypt · By Decrypt Staff
In brief
Millennium, Goldman Sachs, Tudor and six other firms cut 68,000 BTC worth of spot Bitcoin ETF holdings, more than the 48,000 BTC decline across all 13F filers.
Morgan Stanley’s wealth arm, Mubadala and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council were among the buyers.
Galaxy says sellers left because the futures basis shrank to just 0.6 points over Treasury bills, not because they soured on Bitcoin.
The investors who sold Bitcoin through its 2026 slump weren’t the crowd you might expect.
A Galaxy Research report published Monday found that a handful of hedge funds and banks drove almost all of the institutional selling in U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, while wealth platforms and sovereign funds stepped in to buy.
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Institutions that file quarterly 13F reports with the SEC held 355,000 BTC worth of spot ETF shares at the end of September 2025, just before Bitcoin’s all-time high. By June 2026, that had fallen to 307,000 BTC, a 14% drop, the report found.
Nine firms account for more than all of that decline: Millennium Management, Brevan Howard, Goldman Sachs, Capula Management, Farallon Capital, D.E. Shaw, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, Symmetry Investments and Tudor Investment.
Together they cut 68,000 BTC worth of exposure, roughly $5.4 billion at today’s prices, trimming their positions by between 29% and 100%. That means the other roughly 2,200 filers added about 20,000 BTC in aggregate, worth roughly $1.6 billion.
Morgan Stanley’s wealth management arm, Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council were among the buyers. Advisers, family offices, and individuals who don’t file 13Fs cut their holdings by just 6.6% while the price fell 49%.
BitcoinBTC · USD$80,532−4.75%Oct 21Oct 23Oct 25Oct 26Oct 28$84.8k$83.1k$81.3k$79.6k24h HighHigh$81,63624h LowLow$80,360VolVol$918.9M→Buy Bitcoin with USDTPowered by JupiterPrice data by CoinGeckoCoinGeckoMore Bitcoin news and projections →Galaxy head of firmwide research Alex Thorn says the sellers were largely running a trade, not making a bet on Bitcoin. Many used the cash-and-carry strategy: buying spot ETF shares while shorting CME Bitcoin futures to pocket the gap between the two, known as the basis.
That gap has nearly vanished. The front-month basis averaged 7.9% annualized in the 30 days before Bitcoin’s high, 3.9 percentage points above three-month Treasury bills. In the 30 days to Oct. 21, it averaged 4.8%, just 0.6 points above bills. After fees, rolling costs and margin, the trade now earns about 1.5 points over cash, the report estimates.
“That arithmetic, not the price, is why the multi-strategy desks left,” Thorn wrote.