The most noteworthy event in September 2021 was probably the apparent collapse of Evergrande, one of the largest real estate companies in China, whose status is currently unknown. On Thursday, 16th September 2021, Evergrande issued a statement that it will not be able to repay the outstanding interest payments that day. Following this announcement, the financial market was in substantial stress. Equity markets all around the world lost a few percentage points and volatility spiked. Bond trading was under pressure as well, as Evergrande’s bonds were downgraded and frozen from trading. It sometimes was already referred to the next “Lehman Brothers” case.  The volatility the stock has seen since is tremendous, as it lost nearly 80% in the first few days after the announcement. It seemed as though the situation had stabilized, but since not all due payments were paid on Friday, 24th September 2021, the status is unknown. If nothing else happens, which is highly unlikely, the company would enter a grace period following bankruptcy. There are three critical features involved in Evergrande. Firstly, China and Chinese people are heavily engaged with the company, as the company has sold many buildings already without having built them yet. A default would cause huge issues for the affected people. Secondly, many companies are frequently doing business with Evergrande, in particular construction, design and other suppliers, could also face bankruptcy alongside Evergrande. Lastly, the collapse of Evergrande would pose a substantial risk to the financial system of China. The latter one is in particular difficult, as the company has outstanding debt at more than 250 banks, which could put additional pressure on China’s ability to offer cheap debt, which is necessary to maintain growth level. Moreover, it does not make a China a more appealing place to invest for foreign investors, which were already on the decline since the recent developments

In such a highly uncertain environment, cryptocurrencies tend to thrive. Since the middle of July 2021, cryptocurrencies have performed very well. In particular applications on layer one chains, such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), surged during this time. These applications can be split into several categories. These include for example, decentralized exchanges (DeX) and decentralized finance (DeFi). DeX’s are on the rise and are continuously optimized. At the current time, Uniswap v3 is the DeX with the largest trading volume ($800m in 24h), followed by PancakeSwap v2 with around $378m in 24h. In total, 10 different DeX’s have a daily trading volume exceeding $100m. These numbers are quite impressive given that centralized exchanges are young themselves. Binance, by far the largest cryptocurrency exchange, has a daily volume of $23bn. Coinbase, probably the most famous one due to going public, only has a daily volume of around $3bn. DeX’s have two major advantages compared to centralized exchanges. They tend to be cheaper, as only the gas for the transaction needs to be paid and they typically have no downtime, which occur quite frequently for centralized exchange in highly stressed environments. Yet, DeX’s remain a relatively small proportion of cryptocurrency exchanges. Over the last months, FTX was the most talked about exchange for several reasons. FTX is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange and made headlines with its last funding round. FTX raised $900m and is now valued at $18bn. This is especially remarkable, as the company was valued at $1.2bn a year ago. Furthermore, there is barely any day without announcement about their attempt to increase their brand awareness. Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen and Stephen Curry are just some brand ambassadors. They have also secured the naming right for stadiums, e.g. the Berkeley stadium, and have entered a multi-year sponsorship deal with the famous e-sport team TSM. Despite the significant spending on their brand awareness, the public seems to react well to their efforts, as their token (FTT) has reached a new record high, as shown in Figure 9. Another significant player among cryptocurrency exchanges is Bakkt, the first exchange that offered physically settled BTC futures and options and being owned by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). Although, it is known that Bakkt will go public since January 2021, it is widely anticipated that this should take place relatively soon. It is certainly interesting to find out where the second cryptocurrency company will end up after its SPAC listing valued at $2.1bn. The other category mentioned previously, DeFi, is more well-known since its application are very diverse. DeFi is typically measured by the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi, which is shown in Figure 10. Shortly before the most recent crash, TVL reached almost $100bn. At the time of writing, TVL is around $87bn. This is remarkable as at the beginning of 2020, TVL was only several million. Yet, the metric is not entirely transparent and various sources claim hugely different values. The issue with the metric is the tracking of the capital committed, measured by the collateral to make decentralized applications (DApps) comparable, as some of them are levered. But the measurement of TVL is difficult for several reasons. Firstly, the measure counts all values of different chains and the respective sub-chains. As they launch frequently, there can be mismatches. Secondly, various DApps allow all kinds of collaterals and those can be traded centralized, on-chain or off-chain, which makes their aggregation difficult to track. Lastly, value locked may be misleading, since liquidity can be added and removed very quickly, which poses additional tracking difficulties. DApps in DeFi also have the potential to revolutionize the traditional banking system, as basically any function from traditional banking is already available as DApp. Many early DApps focused on payment solutions, as many see the current payment methods
from the banking system as flawed in particular cross-border transactions, the time they require, and the fees associated with transactions. There are also many non-blockchain based solutions out there already with online banks, such as Revolut, or Wise that recently went public. Newer DApps started focusing on the lending function of the current banks. At the current stage, most capital in DeFi flows into such lending applications. The most valuable ones are Aave, Maker and InstaDApp, which all have around $13bn value locked in the application. InstaDApp is an asset management platform for DeFi platforms. It makes transactions between DeFi platforms easy, and it does not trigger fees, except the gas costs for the movement of assets. InstaDApp has now fully issued their token (INST). The price development of INST is shown in Figure 11.

​August 2021 was a very good month for many asset classes. Equities in general did very well, as the S&P 500 surpassed the 4,500 mark at the end of last week. This was largely backed by surge in technology-driven stocks that have done very well since the crisis began and do not seem to slow down. There also was a substantial rebound from the continuous selloff of Chinese stocks, in particular tech stocks, as for example Alibaba surged 9% in a single day. Similarly, hedge funds also had a strong July and saw continued inflows since May 2021 during which period the AuM increased significantly to $4.32tn. Aside from inflows, the AuM was also boosted by the good performance of hedge funds, as our SMC Single Manager Cross-Asset Index is up 5.4% in July 2021. These gains largely stem from tactical trading and cryptocurrency-based strategies, while only equity strategies were down slightly. The best strategies in July focused largely on cryptocurrencies that have recovered well from their severe drop a couple of months ago. The market cap of cryptocurrencies just surpassed the $2tn mark again, largely due to the surge of altcoins. Bitcoin (BTC) is relatively low with $48k at the time of writing. Ethereum (ETH) is a lot higher, but also quite far away from its peak with being worth $3,200 currently. Other altcoins like Cardano (ADA), the now third-largest cryptocurrency, have surpassed their previous records by almost 50% already and continue to reduce the dominance of BTC and ETH. Gold, and other precious metals, that suffered in 2021 so far, have seen an upward trend over the last weeks, but they remain at relatively low levels.

​The macroeconomic environment will largely drive the market in H2 2021, which itself is based on significant degree how Covid-19 will evolve in the near future. With regards to the pandemic, the key questions are how the number of vaccinations evolve going forward, in particular as developed economies no longer have shortages of vaccines, but rather a declining number of people that want to get vaccinated. A crucial point is whether herd immunity can be achieved, either by being vaccinated or having had the virus. Another important point is how long the vaccine will last, as the cases of vaccinated people contracting the virus rises. Luckily, the symptoms seem to be minor. Probably even more important is whether new strains of the virus emerge that completely bypass vaccinations and essentially setting the world back to March 2020. The latter scenario seems less likely but should be considered to some degree. In a non-negative scenario, US inflation is likely to drop towards the end of the year with expectations around 3%. For the next years, it is expected that US inflation will remain between 2% and 3%, following the change in the FED’s inflation target of being 2% in the long-term instead of capping inflation at 2%. Thus, it is unlikely that inflation will drop below 2% for quite some time. In the EU, the inflation outlook is lower compared to the US, as the ECB expects inflation to rise to around 2.6% in Q4 2021. In 2022 and 2023, inflation is expected to remain around 1.5%. Furthermore, the FED and ECB also hinted at possibly putting more emphasis on employment instead of inflation going forward. This suggests gold being well positioned in the current market. As of July 2021, gold is almost back at its average in 2021 of $1800 per ounce. Despite being at a relatively high level historically, gold seems attractive with surging inflation and short-term interest rates being very close to 0%. Yet gold’s record high of more than $2000 per ounce lies back almost a year, at a point in which inflation was at 1% and not a concern for many. Since May 2021, inflows in gold ETFs are positive again albeit a bit sluggish. This is remarkable as previously, there were mostly only net outflows. Currently, the global gold AuM is at $214bn. Equities, in particular in the US, have experienced a great 2021, as shown in Figure 1. The S&P 500 is trading very close to its record high of around 4,450. During 2021, expectations for the S&P 500 level were adjusted multiple times. At the end of 2020, when the S&P 500 was 3,700, moderate expectations were around 3,900, while optimistic scenarios targeted 4,300. Yet, all those expectations were already surpassed in the low-interest rate environment, monetary stimulus and increased corporate earnings due to the recovery of the economy. Goldman Sachs has updated its target for the S&P 500 to 4,700 at the end of 2021. Contrarily, Chinese tech companies have suffered in July with the worst month since the financial crisis in 2008. Investors feared the crackdown of Chinese regulators on tech companies. Figure 2 shows valuations of Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong and in the US. Not only, are Chinese tech companies strongly undervalued compared to US tech stocks. Furthermore, Chinese tech companies listed in the US are even stronger undervalued, as very few even reach a multiple of 5, as shown in Figure 2.

Hedge funds are doing very well currently. After having suffered substantial drawdowns in March 2020, they delivered what they promised to do. They were able to limit losses well, while profiting significantly from the subsequent upswing. This positioned hedge funds in a good light towards potential investors that previously stepped away from hedge funds or planned to, due to their frequent inability to generate excess returns in boom phases over the last few years. As the crisis was handled well by the industry, this perception significantly shifted. Preqin reported that the average return of hedge funds in 2020 was 16.69% and 12.73% as of June 2021, which are remarkable numbers for this environment. In particular, as some sectors and industries, such as fixed income, are struggling since Covid-19 emerged. Figures 9 to 14 provide a summary of our benchmark indices compared to other widely known benchmarks, based on fixed income, equity, tactical trading and fund of hedge funds strategies. Our two major benchmark indices, the SMC Single Manager Cross-Asset Index and the SMC Cross-Asset Index, are up 26.79% and 24.59% as of June 2021. Fixed Income strategies continue to struggle but managed to achieve solid one-digit returns over 2020 and 2021. The two most outstanding strategies in this asset class are European High Yield L/S Credit with a return of 13.37% in 2021 and Trade Finance Crypto with a YTD of 9.11%. The latter also has not experienced a single negative monthly return since its inception in January 2017. The performance of equity-based strategies in 2021 is 7%, while the individual strategies widely varied since 2020. On the one hand, Long/Short US Equity Consumer, TMT, Healthcare had a stellar return of 66% in 2020 but is stagnating in 2021 with a YTD of 0.13%. On the other hand, Equities US Activist Event Driven was up only 2.52% in 2020 but is up 30.68% in 2021 so far. Our SMC Tactical Trading Strategy Index is up 14% in 2021 and was up 62% in 2020. The global macro strategies deviate strongly from each other’s monthly returns. The Discretionary Global Macro strategy is up 26% in 2021, even though it suffered a loss of 18% in June 2021. In 2020, the strategy also achieved a return of 27%. The Systematic Global Macro strategy is up only 2% as of June 2021 but was up 97% in 2020. Unsurprisingly, the SMC Cryptocurrency Strategy Index had the best performance in both 2021 and 2020. In 2021, the index is up 101% and in 2020 340%. The crypto-based strategies range from Token Liquid with a YTD 2021 of 171% to Bitcoin that is up only 19.2% YTD 2021. Over the last two years, the Token strategy was the most successful one with being up 504% in 2020 and another 164% in 2021. Cryptocurrencies are further described in following section.