Bitcoin Forum

I have just opened my BitCoin denominated fund for public to invest in. Check it out: www.ultimafund.com

Please read FAQ page for some info and if you have more questions ask here or send an email (info AT ultimafund.com).

And who are you and why should I trust you with my money?

+1 you are advertising remember

I'm considering 5% to be a respectable and expected yearly return. That if you are investing on something safe.

Say I invest 500 BitCoin

-> Deposit Fee ( ??? ) : 500 x 0.97 = 485 BitCoin.
-> 5% Yearly Return: 509.25 BitCoin.
-> Profit Fee : 509.25 - 2.425 = 506.825 BitCoin.

I hope there isn't a withdraw fee. That is a 1.3% yearly return.
Seriously, you should consider it again.

Well I think this is a big Ponzi scam. Prove me wrong if you can :P

It is not supposed to be a risk free investment. The fund had 8.37% return since inception (less than 1 month). This is 115% annualized. I managed to achieve that kind of return because of very good arbitrage opportunities this week. And my S&P 500 short position returned more than 1% in last week (and has been closed), so don't expect 115% after one year. My target is 30%, but in times like these (last 2 weeks) I can make a lot more. Yes, there are risks, this is clearly stated in FAQ section.


I post my position changes on fund's twitter account and on ultimafund.com webpage. You can check twitter.com/ultimafund when I posted that I opened S&P 500 short position and compere the movement of the index and fund's share price. I closed the position today.

Monday's price rise was affected by arbitrage trading. Mtgox/Tradehill and Tradehill/Bitstamp. You can even go to bitstamp.net and see Monday's transactions when I sold 100 BTC @ $2.85 and $2.79 when price on MtGox was $2.30 (https://www.bitstamp.net/market/last_trades/ see my two trades @ 11.14.2011 18:03:59).

When i try going onto your website I get a 500 error code, it kind of makes me a bit nervous. You guys are still here right, it's just the servers that is down?

Yes, there was a server problem. We use google cloud services, there is nothing we can do about that. Google switched to new billing recently, so they could have some problems with that.

Our fund is now 1 month old and we managed to collect our first 400 BTC. I want to thank everybody for placing your trust in us. We added fund size data on our front page yesterday, so now you can track fund movements. We plan to add personal charts to user's account page (to track personal fund flows), statistcs page (with fund detailed statistics and charts) and fund history export in CSV format (value, shares outstanding, size). This should increase our transparency.

We also feel that our plain HTML website needs an upgrade. We are looking for a web designer to make our site look good. Send us PM or email to info@ultimafund.com if you are interested.

Payment in bitcoins (or paypal if you prefer).

If your funds positions are all public, what prevents someone from just copying all of your positions while keeping their money to themselves?

I post most of the portfolio changes on fund's twitter account, however these are past events. And you don't know what is our position strategy. It could be short term or long term position. You also don't know the position size.

Most of the hedge funds post quarterly portfolios. I believe US hedge funds are required to.

+2
The domain is registered anonymously by proxy.

Did anyone used this Fund and want to share expiriences?

I have used it, seems like a nice going fund, legit and a good profit :) Though I have not cashed out yet :P I have invested 7 BTC and after I have gotten back the initial fees (about 3 weeks), I have had a overall profit even though it goes up and down each day as expected.
// DeaDTerra

Remember, trust NO ONE

Hi all,

I like the idea of using rather than hoarding bitcoins. So, I am giving this a try for two months to see how it goes. Just put in 33BTC last night.

Update from this morning: The 33BTC I invested already missed out on the 12% gain this morning in short trading with BTC/USD, so not off to the best start. Let's see how the fund does over the Holidays.  ;)

Out of curiosity, what keeps others from investing in this fund or similar bitcoin funds? For me, I am reluctant to invest any more than I have without some sort of third party assurance or community involvement of some sort to reassure me that the site's owner will not walk away with all of the deposits. Any ideas on how to improve trust in the bitcoin community in these types of situations?

I agree... threw in a few coins to test the waters

Improve trust? For one, they shouldn't be anonymous. Keeping your money while being anonymous will get you in trouble someday. You can almost count on it!

i am a user of ultima fund and i invest first time 4 btc to see if website is serious, after few day ( nearly 1 week ) i withdraw my 4 btc and i win 0.06 btc in 1 week, today i put all my wallet because when i keep my btc at my computer i have 30 btc, fifty day later i have 30 btc !!
but with ultima fund i have 30.95 btc and i can withdraw all the time

it's a really good service for me

Bernard Madoff was running his ponzi scheme for decades, with many happy customers, who withdrew their money... Its just the way ponzi schemes are played.

It is not a ponzi scheme. You can all decide to withdraw all your funds right now (or any time in the future) and you will get all your bitcoins back.

Since this ponzi scheme is at its beginning..then we 1st users will do OK...the suckers at the end will lose. ;)

But Seriously   ,  "Its a ponzi scheme " is being very much overused on this forum .
Bitcoin as a whole is considered such a scheme by many... but we don't believe that now... Do we?  ;)

Weasel words. A Ponzi scheme requires someone in control of the fund who knows when to cash out. Many of the early adopters have already sold their shares from when Bitcoin was worth much more last year. Bitcoin holders lack the coordination for a widely distributed Ponzi scheme.

The Ponzi potential is a problem with all opaque investment funds controlled by a single entity.

Maybe I was misunderstood...  I don't believe bitcoin is a ponzi scheme...
shouldn't have put the wink at the end...

They cannot afford not to be. What they are doing probably breaks tons of laws, and I don't even need to know where they live to make such claim. You just can't legally open your own startup to compete with financial institutions like this. They must remain anonymous if they want to survive.

Remaining anonymous is also very handy for if or when the fund manager decides to disappear with everyone's bitcoins, or the market is blamed for the fund's collapse.  This is the reason why funds and managers tend to be registered and regulated. 

I understand this. It doesn't inspire trust. Nobody should invest in it more than what they can lose.

But what other alternative does the fund administrator have? What's he's doing is illegal in the entire world AFAIK, even being perfectly ethical.


Please... the reasons they are regulated are mainly

• To protect established business from new competitors
• To allow government to track and tax money

It has nothing to do with protecting costumers.

Currently I am trading BTC/USD and doing bitcoin exchanges arbitrage. I don't have any positions in other currencies at the moment (options, index CFDs mostly).

All investments denominated in other currencies are bought with borrowed money, so the only thing exposed to BTC/USD rate is profit/loss of a position. I never sell bitcoins and use currency to buy something else.

About benchmark... do you have any sugestions what benchmark could a bitcoin trading fund use? I have no idea.

I would be happy to register a company and everything. But to start a hedge fund I would need more money in my fund than the entire bitcoin economy to cover all legal costs. I would rather continue investing my own money.

Everyone can always go with regulated and safe funds. Give your money to some mutual fund, they will charge you the same fees as I am and simply buy a few stocks and hold them forever. But it will be super mega regulated and safe.

And then some day the company goes broke and they tell you they don't know where your money is. Nothing happens... I know a few people who lost money with MF Global (and before someone starts, I know MFG is not a mutual fund, it is just an example). Why are big companies in favor of more regulation? Because they are the only ones who can afford it, no new players can enter the industry.

Some of you (catfish)are taking this to far...

The guy opened a nice small investment fund... nobody expects you to put your life savings into it.
But a few spare coins on the chance he does good,  why not?

No riskier than loaning bitcoins on the loan thread to make a few % a month, or gambling
a few coins here and there.

I think none. Entire bitcoin economy is a pocket change for hedge funds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_bullion_market#Market_size

The average daily volume of gold and silver cleared at the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) in November 2008 was 18.3 million ounces (worth $13.9 billion) and 107.6 million ounces (worth $1.1 billion) respectively. This means that an amount equal to the annual gold mine production was cleared at the LBMA every 4.4 days, and to the annual silver production every 6.2 days.

All bitcoins at the moment are worth a little more than $50 million. And only a small amount of bitcoins are traded. So imagine a hedge fund decides to throw in a little change, a few hundred or a million USD. There is no way you can buy that amount without pushing the price to the moon.

Im happy to hear that. Longer track record is something we are counting on.

Current price volatility is very hard to manage. People think the fund should go up if the price of bitcoin goes up, but the reality is that it is very hard to go long bitcoins with bitcoins. You can do that using Bitcoinica, but it is very risky. You get USD if the price goes up, but the bitcoins are also more expensive, so your profit buys less. If the price goes down you loose USD and your bitcoins used to maintain margin are worth less. The result is if you buy 100 bitcoins with 100 bitcoins deposit and the price goes up 100%, you get only 50% BTC profit. But if the price goes down 50% you loose 100% of your bitcoins. We need bitcoin futures or options in the bitcoin economy.

I am researching your fund as a possible investment.

Looking at the fees listed on your web site.

    Deposit fee: 3.00%
    *Profit fee: 10.00%

How did you come up with this as your funding model? Just curious. If I were to make one long term investment, aside from the auto-calculated profit-fee, you would charge me for just the initial 3% deposit, correct?

You state in your FAQ that you trade in publicly traded companies/funds. Any way for shareholders to track your investments? Are these listed in your investor reports?

Why are you not listed on the GLBSE, Global Bitcoin Stock Exchange, like other Bitcoin-based funds?

Your fund model appears to be using a pool of bitcoins as collateral for investment in conventional companies/funds. If investments go negative, you dip into the bitcoin funds to cover losses. When this happens, do you report to the shareholders when and how many bitcoins are used to cover losses? And if so, how do you report this information.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my concerns.

SJ

I looked at various mutual and hedge funds and based my fees on their expenses. Yes if you deposit 100 BTC you get 97 BTC to your account. That is all.

I post my actions on fund's twitter account (also displayed on the ultimafund.com page) and in monthly reports. December report is coming this week.

I looked at GLBSE and decided it is not a good solution. I never wanted to have a closed end fund. You would have to sell your shares to a buyer. If there were no buyers at the time, you could not get your money back. And people would have to use GLBSE to be able to invest in this fund. This is a big problem, to limit yourself to a small group of people that know what GLBSE is. Instead I wanted an easy to invest thing, like mutual fund. You open an account and make a deposit.

I post most of the position changes on fund's twitter account. All other details are included in monthly reports.

Thanks,  I do like the liquidity aspect of your fund.  I have noticed it's almost impossible to sell out of GLBSE shares without incurring a loss.

so... where is this thing?

I will take a look at GLBSE when I have some time, it looks some kind of a geeky-type thing, very comlicated. Could you please send an email to info at ultimafund.com with some financials. I looked at your forum thread, but there are 19 pages of conversation to read :).


We had some server problems yesterday.

you have a very well done site. nice statistics, data exporting, looks great.

Can you comment on why your site looks almost identical to hyipbit.com? Is that a common template? There are other features of it that suggest they came from the same source, too.

The site was so nice he made it twice

I have never seen hyipbit.com before. As soon as I saw 5% daily return I closed the window, and won't even bother commenting it. Yes, ultima fund template was bought and can be bought by other people too, but hyipbit includes the same site structure, menus and very similar texts.

We are not in any way connected to this site.

Happy new year everybody!

Just wanted to let you know we are still around. We've had a rough year with bitcoinica and GLBSE imploding. This can be clearly seen on our price history chart, but the important thing is we managed to limit our losses significantly and what is even more important we have been making a healthy returns since then. We are still 10% underwater since fund inception and more than 20% down from our tops.

Please check our monthly reports on www.ultimafund.com for more info on our investments.

Wasn't sure if you guys where still around since there hasn't been any news updates or updates on the twitter feed for sometime.

I also saw that website since last May until now and several time I always come across negative in fund performance (%)!

How can they offer investment plan at this point?

I hope that some can clarify what they do with funds!

For such service that been around for a while, it doesn't give any positive assurance!

Or if there other similar programs offering investment plans better than them and without putting heavy lost on members, let me know!

Regards

I am preserving this.


Only -30%, there's plenty of stuff that did a lot worse. Starting with miner bonds.

Yes but the program is always in the negative almost each time and will be best for being in the positive for a change!

Hi, asking here, because you aren't anwering on email. It will be a month soon when I requested withdrawal. It's very very small amount (cca 1.99 shares) so where is the problem? It this any fraud?

I requested withdrawal myself about two weeks ago, and haven't received anything either. At this point, I'm going to consider it a fraud (although I will be very happy if I am proven wrong).

my withdraw is not working either, there is no contact info on page

ultima is not answering my messages about withdraw from his fund

I also tried contacting the guy there are 0.2 BTC that went to the wallett but never made to the fund!
Just found his mail, info@ultimafund.com use it guys!

NOTICE: This domain name expired on 10/25/2013 and is pending renewal or deletion.

Creation Date: 2011-10-25 07:18:58
Registrar Expiration Date: 2013-10-25 07:18:58

-> Best scenario the guy is on some long trip and forgot to renewal the domain.
-> Worst scenario...

And from reading this from the beginning it is easy to see why people initially had doubts. Sure, relatively stable in the short term, two years down the line can you really trust this person? Is this the right time to ask this question?

Is anyone planning prosecution? (is that the right word?)

http://www.ultimafund.com/ now re-directes to http://www.uniqueproperty.com.

I put 0.01 BTC in back when it was $6, I was always shocked how the fund lost money every month and no one said much. I bet this guy is a millionaire today.