(Reuters) - Brevan Howard does a significant amount of its crypto trading from the United Arab Emirates because of the country's "sensible regulations," an executive from the hedge fund told the AIM conference in Dubai on Monday.
"The regulators in the UAE are hard, but they want the industry to fly and so they write sensible regulations and they are prepared to talk to the industry in order to evolve those regulations," Ryan Taylor, group head of compliance at hedge fund Brevan Howard, said during a panel on hedge fund trends and strategies.
Taylor said that Brevan Howard's crypto trading operations represented about $2 billion of the firm's total strategies which he said were over $30 billion. Beyond saying the UAE's share of trading was significant, he did not give any precise indication.
"We're also seeing new opportunities, such as those that are happening here in the UAE, whether it's from the equity market or other opportunities, and we're all excited about that," Brandon Robinson, deputy head of private markets at JPMorgan Asset Management, said during the same debate.
Robinson, who oversees a department at JPMorgan that invests in some hedge funds, said the bank was talking to several managers in the area.
"The growth has been unprecedented. We thought the growth was up last year. It's been just the same again," said Jonathan Beardall, head of wealth and asset management at the Dubai International Financial Centre Authority (DIFC).
Dubai has 65 hedge funds registered in the city centre and that number would increase to 70 in the next few weeks, Beardall said.
Hedge funds trading on macro economics were up 3.6% for the year to the end of September, compared with the same period last year, hedge fund research firm Pivotal Path found.