Tudor adds to IBIT, still 91% below peak

Paul Tudor Jones' firm added to its BlackRock bitcoin ETF stake in the second quarter, the first increase after a full year of selling. Tudor Investment held 688,529 shares of IBIT as of June 30, up 18.9% from 579,083 shares at the end of March, according to its 13F filing.

The numbers behind the buyback

The stake was worth $22.9 million on June 30 and has since risen to around $24.5 million. That's a real dollar increase, but the scale tells the actual story: the position is still 91.4% below its late-2024 peak, when Tudor held 8.05 million shares worth $427 million. It also equals roughly 0.03% of the firm's reported 13F securities, a rounding error inside a $71.9 billion portfolio.

Tudor first disclosed an IBIT position of 869,565 shares in mid-2024 and built it up through the year as bitcoin rallied from about $60,000 to $92,000. It then cut the stake in every single quarter of 2025, right through bitcoin's run to an all-time high of $124,000, bottoming out at 576,523 shares in December. The options book moved in the opposite direction of what a simple buy signal would suggest: Tudor's call position tied to underlying IBIT shares fell 85.2% to 148,000, while puts slipped a smaller 1.4% to 715,000. The filing doesn't disclose strike prices or expirations, so those derivative numbers don't translate directly into a bullish or bearish read, but a much bigger cut to calls than to puts is not the options posture of a firm turning aggressively long.

What the pattern actually shows

The headline reads like a comeback bet. The math says it's closer to a rounding correction after a year of methodical de-risking. Tudor built its position into strength in 2024, then trimmed through the strongest part of the 2025 rally and kept trimming as bitcoin cracked lower, only stopping the bleed once the price had fallen enough to make small purchases look proportionate again. An 18.9% increase in share count sounds significant until you see it's an addition of roughly 109,000 shares against a base that's still down more than 7 million shares from its high.

Tudor Jones has been consistent in his public framing of bitcoin as an inflation hedge, calling it the "best inflation hedge" this spring because of its fixed supply advantage over gold. But the trading behavior across six quarters doesn't track a simple hedging thesis held with conviction. It tracks a macro fund treating bitcoin as a tactical position sized up and down with volatility and price levels, same as any other line item in a $71.9 billion book. The rhetoric is about a structural inflation trade. The 13F is about a fund manager managing exposure the way he'd manage anything else.

That distinction matters for how much signal to pull from a single filing. Institutional 13Fs get read as referendums on conviction, but a quarter-over-quarter share count from one macro fund inside a portfolio this size is thin evidence of anything beyond position sizing at the margin.

One thing to watch

The next 13F, due in November, will show whether this is the start of a rebuild toward the 2024 peak or another one-quarter blip inside a longer decline. A second straight quarter of buying would be the first real signal that Tudor's conviction matches its rhetoric.