Hedge Funds Made Their Rarest Bitcoin Bet in Years, But 2 Charts Say Wait

Hedge funds are the big professional investors who trade to beat the market. For the first time in years, they have turned bullish on Bitcoin. They placed that bet using futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), a regulated US venue.

The shift was flagged by CryptoQuant, a data firm. Two other charts, though, hint that real buyers have not joined in. Hedge funds on CME flipped net long BTC futures.This is rare. The basis trade keeps them structurally short. That's why this chart's been red for years.

You can't carry trade into a net long.The suits are betting on upside. pic.twitter.com/hG1musewVx— Ki Young Ju (@ki_young_ju) August 10, 2026 What the Hedge Funds’ Bitcoin Bet Actually Means Bitcoin futures are contracts that let traders bet on the coin’s price without owning it.

On the CME, most of that trading comes from large professional investors. A US regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), sorts these traders into groups. The group called leveraged funds is mostly hedge funds. For years that group was net short.