Most institutional allocators still run separate teams for different asset classes whether that is digital assets, venture, private equity and traditional public markets, each has its own mandate and its own risk model. Now that strategy, rather than being a guarantee of success, is holding many funds back, and the evidence for that is no longer confined to a single manager’s track record.
The data backs the structure
Independent industry data supports the same conclusion. Citco’s Multi-Strategy Outlook 2026 found that multi-strategy funds delivered a weighted average return of 22.7% in 2025 and attracted $53.4 billion of net inflows, the largest share of any hedge fund segment. The sector is now approaching $1 trillion in assets, and 86% of the industry participants Citco surveyed expect it to keep outpacing every other strategy through 2026.
Capital is moving toward multi-strategy platforms for a structural reason. A fund that only trades one asset class cannot see, price or act on information that originates somewhere else, and allocators are increasingly pricing that limitation into their decisions.
Diversification alone has never been a hard sell to allocators. The newer argument is that diversification itself produces better information rather than just smoother returns. A desk trading digital assets and a desk trading private equity, sitting inside the same firm, each pick up signals the other would otherwise miss.
A company priced itself before it went public
That limitation showed up clearly this year. In May, a synthetic perpetual contract tracking SpaceX went live on Hyperliquid, weeks before the company’s actual IPO. The contract opened at a reference price implying a valuation near $1.78 trillion and traded above $2 trillion within hours, all before SpaceX had priced a single share on the Nasdaq. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 12, close to the level the on-chain market had already converged toward.
A private equity or venture fund with no presence in digital assets had no way to see any of that. The valuation was being discovered and traded weeks in advance, on a venue most single-asset-class allocators still write off as unregulated speculation rather than a genuine pricing signal from an adjacent market.
Prediction markets are becoming a data layer
The same month, Polymarket partnered with Nasdaq Private Market to resolve event contracts on the valuations of major private companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks. Nasdaq Private Market, which normally facilitates secondary trading in private shares, is now supplying the settlement data for a retail prediction market. That pairing puts a continuously updating, publicly visible probability on questions a venture fund often spends months trying to answer through its own network alone.
A venture team with no reason to look at a prediction market platform will never see that signal, regardless of how good its own research process is. A multi-asset platform with a presence in both markets sees it by default, simply because someone on the desk is already watching and already knows what the number means for the rest of the portfolio.
Where Allocators Get Stuck
This shows up most clearly at smaller institutions. These are private equity firms, venture funds and family offices that built one team around one mandate years ago and have not restructured since. Their venture analyst rarely talks to whoever runs the liquid book, if a liquid book exists at all, and their exposure to newer market structures, if they have any, tends to sit in a separate fund with a separate manager. The cost generally shows up over the long term, in signals seen too late and in valuations taken at face value that a connected desk would have questioned earlier.
A single-strategy fund can still compete on depth within its own mandate, and specialisation is not the enemy here. The structure itself still draws a boundary around what the team can see, though, regardless of how good the analysts inside it are, and that boundary is exactly what the Citco data suggests allocators are starting to price in.
Closing this gap has less to do with new technology and more to do with a shared research calendar and a genuine expectation that one desk’s view gets tested against another’s before capital moves. Most single-mandate funds have none of this in place, which is a structural choice rather than a resourcing problem.
What I Would Ask a Fellow Allocator
I help run a multi-asset investment firm, so I have an obvious interest in this argument. That does not make the underlying data less real, and the Citco numbers exist independently of anything Cypher Capital does. Capital is already voting with its feet, and the SpaceX perpetual and the Polymarket-Nasdaq tie-up are simply two visible examples of the mechanism behind that shift.
If you run money across more than one mandate, the test is not whether your teams meet monthly. It is whether something one desk sees changes how another desk prices its next position, in practice, on a specific deal. The allocators who close that gap will see more of what is actually happening than the ones who leave it open, and the Citco numbers suggest the market is already starting to reward them for it.
