Tudor Investment Corporation, the hedge fund founded by Paul Tudor Jones, raised its stake in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) for the first time in a year, according to its Q2 2026 Form 13F filed with the SEC on Aug. 14. The firm held 688,529 IBIT shares worth roughly $22.9 million as of June 30, up 18.9% from the 579,083 shares it reported at the end of the first quarter.
The increase marks a reversal after Tudor Investment trimmed its bitcoin ETF position in every quarter of 2025, even as bitcoin rallied to an all-time high near $124,000 during the second and third quarters of that year. The fund's IBIT stake remains a fraction of its size at its late-2024 peak, when Tudor held 8.05 million shares worth $427 million; the current position is roughly 91.4% below that level.
A shift from options to spot exposure
Alongside the share increase, Tudor's options positioning shifted notably. Call-equivalent exposure tied to IBIT fell 85.2% quarter-over-quarter to 148,000 underlying shares, while put-equivalent exposure held roughly flat, slipping 1.4% to 715,000 underlying shares. The pullback in calls alongside a larger direct share position suggests a rotation away from tactical, leveraged optionality and toward a more straightforward, committed spot bitcoin allocation.
Tudor's IBIT holding is a small slice of the firm's roughly $71.9 billion overall portfolio, underscoring that even a meaningful percentage increase in the bitcoin ETF stake represents a modest bet in the context of the fund's total assets under management.
Part of a broader institutional trend
Tudor isn't alone in adding exposure. Across Q2 2026, aggregate institutional bitcoin holdings reported in 13F filings rose 7.5% even as bitcoin's price fell 14.2% over the same period, a divergence that suggests institutions used the pullback to accumulate rather than retreat. Institutional ownership of spot bitcoin ETF assets has climbed to about 38%, up from 24% a year earlier, with IBIT alone commanding roughly 49% of the nearly $105 billion held across all U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs.
Related: Coinbase Bitcoin Premium Stays Negative for Record 90 Days
Other hedge funds moved more aggressively into IBIT in the same quarter: Context Capital Management and Compass Rose Asset Management opened new positions worth $191 million and $122 million respectively. Against that backdrop, Tudor's modest add reads less as a standalone bullish signal and more as one data point in a broader pattern of institutional buyers stepping back into bitcoin ETFs during the second-quarter price decline.
