A DUO believed to be the youngest regulated hedge fund managers in Europe are specialising in digital assets such as crypto currency.

Former professional footballer Adam Brice and friend Neel Saund set up on their own after heading a digital asset desk at a hedge fund in Winchester.

The Hampshire duo’s fund specialises in digital currencies, the best-known of which is Bitcoin.

Mr Saund is a medical science graduate from the Univeristy of Birmingham, but has traded global markets since 2011 and crypto since 2014.

He met Mr Brice – a former player for Winchester City, Gosport, Farnborough and Woking – when the ex-footballer was heading the commodities desk of the Winchester firm where they both worked.

They teamed up in 2020 to create a regulated digital asset hedge fund, when Mr Saund was 25 and Mr Brice was 26.

Digital currencies such as Bitcoin are “mined” by harnessing the power of a network of connected computers.

Mr Saund said: “It’s free of central bank controls. It’s controlled directly by the people who have a direct stake in the system. People own a part of the system, not just the Bitcoin.”

Some prominent people in the banking world, including JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, have initially been critical of crypto currencies but ended up involved with them.

“It’s almost human nature to talk down something that’s different from what we know to be true and real. Every single person that you find has seriously researched it has been converted,” said Mr Saund.

“Every single person over the last few years who has publicly denounced or laughed at Bitcoin – every single bank has now quietly set up a crypto currency trading division.”

He said countries with volatile economies, such as El Salvador, saw digital currencies as secure by comparison. And he said crypto could be a hedge against rising costs in the UK.

“We’re looking at an economy that’s got six or seven per cent CPI (consumer prices index inflation). Every saver in the world is losing money by saving, so you could argue that living is the biggest bubble of all,” he said.

He likened digital currencies to the early days of digital giants such as Amazon, whose share price once fell by 90-plus per cent and four times fell by at least 55 per cent in the early days.

He said people who saw the bigger picture reaped the rewards as those digital firms took hold.

“Crypto represents more than that because it’s a financial evolution of the whole system rather than just one niche market sector,” he added.

But while some early adopters of crypto made huge gains, Mr Saund said people should not see it as a way to overnight riches.

“If you’ve got a more mature, longer-term investment timeframe – five to 10 years – digital assets will likely outperform most traditional assets in growth percentage as we have seen historically,” he said.

“This is largely due to the space becoming more mature over time and larger players such as banks, hedge funds and asset managers slowly becoming comfortable enough to allocate capital.”

He added: “The main variable is which horse to back.”

He said there were a small number of digital currencies whereas online businesses such as Amazon and Facebook were winners “in a race with over 10,000 horses”.

He takes issue with claims that digital currencies are environmentally unfriendly, arguing that the data has been misrepresented. Most crypto currencies have plans to move to “proof of stake” systems that use less energy than the “proof of work” system based on computer power, he said.