Exchange-rate : .00319
Adjusted NAV/U : 27.8738

Bid at : 28.5

Have only put up the higher bid for now (the one on offer until end of tomorrow in case anyone wants out because of the pass-through motion).  The lower bid got auto-cancelled earlier - a few sells into us took cash too low to cover both bids.  I should have seen that coming really - as 2 bids totalling 150 units (30% of ALL units) was nearly 4k LTC - which is pretty much what I keep on hand on LTC-GLOBAL.  I'd not taken into account that the rapidly rising NAV/U means more funds needed to cover the bid-wall.

No harm done - the 50 unit higher bid remained untouched.  For now I'll just keep the higher bid up but at 100 units.  Do remember that the fund's commitment is only to have a bid up for 5% of units anyway (25) but I like to keep a larger bid-wall up both to provde faster exit if someone wants out and as a means of showing that we DO have significant LTC on hand on LTC Global.

NAV/U continues to rise as a result of LTC falling - though we're up just over 4.5% from trading so far this week, so a decent part of the rise is 'real' profits.

Not much happening price-wise on either pass-through other than them both rising in LTC price due to the exchange-rate changes.  The BTC rise still continues - so a further drop in LTC (and rise in price of the pass-throughs) seems pretty inevitable.  Of course if this turns out to be a BTC bubble then when it bursts LTC is going to rise back up and the price of pass-throughs fall.  Investors will have to mkae their own call on whether the BTC rise is long-term or short-term - I don't have a strong view either way on it.

You're wrong.

Security is pretty much unrelated to the time taken to solve a block, just to the number of blocks.

If someone has 50% of hashing power they have a 50% chance of solving a block (ANY block) - irrespective of how long (on average) that takes.  They have a 25% chance of solving any given 2 blocks in a row - again, irrespective of how long each one (on average) takes, a 12.5% chance for 3 in a row, 6.25% chance for 4.  So four fast blocks is a LOT more secure than one slow one.

I see a danger in this.

If a group of moderators charged a fee to look over someone's contract and give advice then it's a small step for them to take to adopt the policy that they'll automatically vote no on any proposals that haven't paid the fee (there's a clear financical incentive for them to do precisely that).  There's also an incentive for them to 'guarantee' approval on receipt of a fee.  Both of which move away from approval based on fair assessement to approval based on what boils down to being a bribe.

Whilst the idea is sound in principle it just isn't very good in practice.  I don't see any issue with an individual (or group) charging a fee to help in preparation of a proposal but as soon votes begin to become explicitly or implicitly attached to payment then the whole concept of moderator approval becomes undermined.  This proposal actually highlights one of the major flaws with the system - that often there's financial benefit to a moderator to vote one way or the other irrespective of the merits of a proposal (this proposal would just make it more obvious - the flaw already exists).

I dont have a moderator vote - but if I did then because of what my fund does if I were to vote purely in self-interest (which I wouldn't do - tempting though it would be) then I should be voting Yes on bad/very bad/slightly good investments and NO on anything that actually looked very good (the reasons behind this aren't immediately obvious).   Similarly issuers of assets should vote yes on competitors that are obviously worse than themselves but no on any that are clearly better (being best of a bad bunch is better than being worst of a good bunch from the perspective of sales).  I'd hope noone votes like that but with anonymous voting there's no way to know.

My feeling is that this proposal wasn't actually serious - just an attempt to draw attention to the fact (and it IS a fact) that there's no way of enforcing voting based on any fair criteria (aside from anything else I'd hazard a guess most voters aren't competent to vote - as is the case in just about every vote that occurs anyway).  If the proposal WAS serious then no - it's a bad idea.  If it wasn't serious then yes - there IS an issue with how votes are cast (consider how my fund LTC-ATF can have a 9-8 moderator vote whilst a bond ISSUED by it gets an 11-0 - that makes absolutely zero sense : any reason to vote no on the fund pretty much has to also be a reason to vote no on debt it sells as a debt instrument can't be more reliable than the issuer of it).

Exchange-rate : .00339
Adjusted NAV/U : 27.062

Bid at : 26.4
Higher bid (for those unhappy with addition of pass-throughs) : 27.5

NAV/U (unadjusted) is up 5.17% so far this week but a fair chunk of this is from LTC falling further vs BTC.  We are, however, up just over 3% from actual trading (split about 50/50 between BTC and LTC).  We've also had a fair few shares sell into us - and cash on hand has dropped from just under 90% (when report was produced) to 64%.  Hopefully we'll see some nice profits when those assets sell - remember we never make a profit by buying only by selling (in fact we make a small loss on the books when we buy on all platforms except BitFunder due to transaction fees).

S.BBET is still static at the same price ranges - though has risen on LTC-GLOBAL to reflect the exchange-rate change.  I picked up some more on the buy side yesterday (also sold some on the sell side - which made a profit for the fund) so at present there's still some up at a cheaper rate.

S.DICE seems to be slowly continuing the rise back which started yesterday.  Asks are at ~ .0054 at present but there's very little there then a jump to .0058.  Will keep listings up at the lower price all the time I can replace at that rate - but will have to take listings at that price down later this evening when I go out.  Those wanting to buy in will likely still be able to buy from earlier purchasers who are now reselling at a profit (though S.DICE is still down on MPEx from when we started, the exchange-rate change means it's actually risen in value in LTC).

I forgot to say that management fee for the week was 9 units (rounded down from 9.21) which have now been transferred.

Since posting the report (or maybe whilst I was typing it) S.DICE has gone up a bit in price - and our price on the pass-through raised in line with this.  We also just picked up some S.BBET on the bid side - which are being sold in the pass-through at a price equivalent to .0011 (highest bid on MPEx is still just over .001 and lowest ask .0013).  Price of the BBET will return back up to equivalent to .0013 once we've sold the cheap ones either in the pass-through or on MPEx.

WEEKLY REPORT




There's a few additions to the spreadsheet this week:

CoinBR added as a location we hold BTC at.

A section for pass-through assets has been added.  This lists the shares we operate pass-throughs to and for each lists:
The number we hold on CoinBR.
The number we've sold in our pass-through (this MUST never be higher than the number we hold on CoinBR).
Their price (in BTC) - this will be roughly the mid-point between highest Bid and Lowest Ask on MPEx.
Their value - this is the value of (Number we hold - Number we've sold) so represents the value of them that the fund holds on its own behalf (which counts towards our Gross and Net Asset Values).

Ticker cost has also reappeared as a Miscellaneous item.  We paid 500 LTC for the two tickers which will be depreciated to 0 over a period not exceeding 20 weeks.  As we had a rather good week I've already knocked 30% (150 LTC) off of this.

This was a very good week for the fund - made to look even better in the results because of LTC diving vs BTC.  Before management fee (but after ticker depreciation and bond dividends were paid) our NAV/U grew by 22.61%.   If we apply calculation to remove the effect of the currency change from that we end up with a figure of 14.14% growth in NAV/U due to trading.  Not quite a record for us - but still very respectable.

The pass-throughs (especially S.DICE) have started off nicely.  Now the initial flurry of purchases is out of the way trade on them will probably die down a bit until something happens causing major interest in either.  S.DICE price has dropped back a bit since we launched the pass-through - but there's still few sell orders up to .007 so no great resistance to it rising back over the price when we launched.  S.BBET has had little trading on MPEx and the price is currently pretty stable - with Bids at just over .001 and lowest ask at .0013.  I'd expect major activity on that when the first results for it come in - it could shoot right up or drop right down.  The results for first month won't actually be that meaningful (it'll be a partial month and the business model means profits SHOULD be way lower than usual in it anyway) but I'd still expect an over-reaction in one way or the other when they are published and dividend distributed.

Trading has been pretty slow on most platforms - though we made a respectable profit on BTC.CO on fairly low volume.  Both BTC.CO and Bitfunder have their fair share of dead/dieing ex-GLBSE assets that are using them as a retirement home in which to quietly die.  Those assets get very little trade - current investors want to sell for a price that won't cause them much loss, noone else wants to buy in above real current value which is a LOT lower.  Crypto-Stocks remains pretty much dead - but will leave the few BTC we have on there as there are a couple of decentish trading opportunities that show up from time to time.

With the velocity slowing down on pass-through sales we'll need no extra cash for that - so at present I see no need to issue extra bonds.  The fund is bidding on some assets being sold during the closedown of the various assets run by usagi.  If we win a lot of our bids then this may need to be revisited (most of them are things that I believe we can sell at good profit over a longer period than usual).  I'll give an explanation of why I bought any assets that we won - as the record of my pruchase would be public (and it's a one-off) there's no harm to the fund in my explaining why I was willing to pay what I paid.

Bid at : 25.2
Higher bid (because of contract change) : 26.5

Yep this.  He was borrowing (actually stealing with the intent to replace it later) investors' dividend payments to upgrade to ASICs and hoping noone would notice.  But the delays from BFL made that impossible.  Now he's in hiding and will probably stay in hiding until he gets the ASICs.  Then he'll either do a runner or use the mined income from the ASICs to pay off his debts and claim he did nothing wrong (plus offer upgrades to the.ASICs he bought with the stolen funds).

If this was a bet then I'd marginally be inclined to bet on the side that he'll just do a runner - especially if noone has any contact information allowing pressure to be put on him by contacting his friends/family/work-mates.

Could you clarify what time it finishes at?  And is there an anti-sniper period?

I should clarify a point in the above post.

When I refer to a trading profit of 8% per week that's measured as a percentage of the fund's own capital.  The capital actually used is the fund's profit + bond-raised capital, so the percentage return on capital USED is actually lower (though for most historical results there were no bonds - so historically it's actually pretty accurate).

A limit is set on number of bonds that can be issued (face-value of 150% of fund's own capital) and on interest rate payable (1/3 average trading profit %) such that the rate paid isn't allowed to exceed the returns generated on actual capital used anyway (if it falls near there then I have to start buying back bonds - if it falls below it I have to force-recall all bonds at a markup to face value).

The 0.6% profit comes from LTC-ATF's trading.  To take a snap-shot right now (we're up a bit since last report):

The total assets LTC-ATF manages (ignoring shares SOLD in pass-throughs as those aren't tradable) are:

47.07 BTC worth of BTC cash and BTC denominated securities
plus 9.6k LTC worth of LTC cash and LTC denominated securities

Bonds sold have a face value of 35 BTC

All of those funds are used for trading and (now) to run the pass-throughs.

Now if we didn't have the bonds issued we'd only have 12.07 BTC in BTC cash or BTC-denominated capital - which means we couldn't do anything like the amount of trading the fund actually does.  That leads to two questions:

1.  Is the extra trading profitable by enough to pay for the bonds?
2.  Would the fund be better off selling more units in itself (where there's no commitment to pay dividends) rather than selling bonds?

The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes in my view.

The cost to support the bonds is 0.6% of face value per week - so with 35 BTC worth of them out there that's a whopping 0.216 BTC per week we need to make in extra profit to pay for them.  That's buying 2 shares at 1.0 and selling them at 1.1.  Every week since starting the bonds they've generated far more profit than that.

Here's some of the very early trades I did on S-Dice - prior to that I'd made another deposit and bouhgt some as a float for the pass-through.

01/16/2013 22:17PM    863    Sell    S.DICE    500    0.005807    2.9035    -0.0145175    8.51370531
01/16/2013 22:13PM    861    Buy    S.DICE    500    0.00539589    -2.697945    -0.01348973    5.62472281
01/16/2013 22:08PM    860    Sell    S.DICE    500    0.00569016    2.84508    -0.0142254    8.33615754
01/16/2013 21:59PM    857    Buy    S.DICE    500    0.00525471    -2.627355    -0.01313678    5.50530294
01/16/2013 21:27PM    541    Fund    BTC    1    6    6    0    8.14579472

You can see that after 2 buys and 2 sells all of 500 shares we'd made .35 profit - that's more than this week's bond payment already covered.  And we wouldn't be on that platform at all were it not for the bonds.

We also have made far more than that on BTC.CO this week - so if you took ALL BTC profits and allocated a percentage of it to bonds you'd still easily see the bonds covered.

But that's just the tip of it.

Consider the 2 pass-throughs - which again couldn't be run without the bonds capital providing the liquidity to keep orders refreshed.  The fund makes around 1-1.5% profit on each sale (more if we manage to buy below lowest ask).  On what we've sold so far in the few days the pass-throughs has been running that's made 0.4 BTC + whatever we've made by buying on bids rather than asks.  And that last bit is where the real profit potentially comes from.  Consider the very first S.DICE I bought (these are the very first transactions on my CoinBR account - immediately before the ones above.  Note that the tat end is available balance - which was altered by other orders that hadn't filled yet so doesnt mean much here).

01/16/2013 20:29PM    855    Buy    S.DICE    500    0.00503208    -2.51604    -0.0125802    0.64553972
01/15/2013 12:07PM    803    Buy    S.DICE    500    0.00462803    -2.314015    -0.01157008    1.67441492
01/15/2013 01:52AM    541    Fund    BTC    1    7    7    0    7

Those blocks were bought at .0046 and .005 but sold at the lowest ask of around .006 - another 0.5 BTC profit.

So just from looking at the first few trades on CoinBR and adding worst-case profits from the pass-through we see a bit over 1.2 BTC profit - over 5 weeks of dividend for ALL the bonds when under half the capital from them is used for that area.  And that's ignoring that once shares in a pass-through are sold the funds gets 1% of their dividends as well.  There's been more profit on there since - and a fair bit on BTC.CO as well this week (none whatsoever on Bitfunder or Crypto - but they've both had weeks when they made enough for 3 months of bond dividends for ALL bonds)

The bonds were issued for two reasons:

1.  To reduce the fund's own exposure to BTC - giving more control to investors to choose and manage their own exposure to different currencies.
2.  To retain as much profit as possible for holders of actual units in the fund.

Point 2 works precisely because  the average profit we make per week on capital is far over 0.6% (ignoring currency movements its actually over 8% on average).  That has built in assumptions that profit is similar on BTC to LTC and that the extra capital can be put to use with similar profitability to old capital (or, more importantly, with a profitability significantly greater than the liability the dividends represents).  So far I'm confident those assumptions are valid (some weeks our BTC stuff does better than our LTC stuff - other weeks its the other way round, but it balances out).

But do bear in mind the fund is still tiny - the rates of profit being achieved wouldn't be deliverable if it was an order of magnitude larger (unless the BTC/LTC securities market also increased by an order of magnitude).  And there IS a not insignificant risk with the bonds - as the fund itself absorbs all trading losses, leveraging bond capital does leave open the possibility of larger losses if something gos badly wrong.  I try to mitigate that by diversification and by selling out positions at the first sniff of trouble (unless I'd already priced it in) even if that means taking a small loss.

If you want to invest you're welcome - however the hard part would be getting units of the fund in the first place.  The only units on sale are a few of my own at prices of around double current NAV/U - and I can't see any reason why the fund itself would sell new units when we can sell bonds that only pay out 0.6% of profit.  Which isn't to say bond-holders get a bad deal either - with LTC falling vs BTC this week the face value (at which they can redeem at ANY time for a small admin fee) has shot up as did their dividend (expressed in LTC) though obviously it was still only 0.6% of the new higher value.

But if you put up bids at a good markup you may find a seller (it won't be me).

You do realise he's stopped selling them?

To convert it to BTC, each share is now backed by hardware orders worth around 0.004 BTC (that's what $4k split between 66k shares works out at).  Without the split each share would be worth ~0.12 - I assume exchange-rate changes and previous dividends account for the 0.18 drop from original price.

You can get documents notarised at most Solicitors (their company name will usually say "Solicitor and Notary public" or similar).  There's a fixed fee for it (varies per So;icitor) - usually in the £25 - £75 range.  There are other people besides SOlicitors who can notarise - but SOlicitors are liekly to be the most accesible ones for you.  Check for any extras they charge before getting it done - you don't want to pay them £1 per sheet for photocopies for example.  You'll need to take along proof of identity (passport is ideal) and the originals of any ID documents being copied/sent (they MAY insist on photocopying the documents themselves).  You'll then swear under oath that the information contained in the affidavit is correct.

You then need to get the documents apostilled (which means a central body confirms that the notarisation is valid).  This has to be done by post with the Legalisation Office of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (you used to be able to get it done in person at Milton Keynes but that option is longer available).  Think the cost of apostille is £35 per document from memory.  Just google for "apostille UK" and I'm sure you'll find the details for that.

It's perfectly legal to copy documents such as passports.  They are explicitly listed as things which can be apostilled - and apostille is pretty much only used when sending documents overseas.  I have no idea if other countries have laws against sending copies of passports - but it's fine from the UK.

My objection to this procedure has always been that the costs are disproportionate for smaller investors and that they're being passed on to investors when the mistake was Giga's.  There's nothing illegal (in the UK) about what is being requested - and were disclosure of the requirement for such documentation made in advance of accepting funds it would be perfectly reasonable.

You mean like you halted all trading on your securities (and disappeared, and deleted all records and disowned all responsibility)?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=35775.200

You're missing two of the largest factors for the recent rise in S.Dice.  Pirate and the collapse of GLBSE.

Whilst GLBSE was running there were a lot of 'businesses' promising rates of return far higher than S.Dice could deliver.  Then pirate happened and GLBSE collapsed.  And investors in most of the old GLBSE companies are realising that maybe the returns from S.Dice aren't that bad compared to losing the lot by investing in a business based on lies ("I didn't invest in pirate"), deceit ("These fixed-rate mining bonds are a good investment") and imaginative accounting ("Let's value things based on what we hope they'll be worth at some point in the future").

The promises S.Dice made (and the returns it offered) were far less than many alternative offering gave.  But now people can look back at what was actually delivered  - and I think that may be getting a lot of people to reconsider their valuation of S.Dice.

And, of course,  S.Dice's revenue and profits are denominated purely in BTC - so when BTC rises (as now) the value of their investment remains the same (in BTC) rather than falling as is the case with any mining investment whose funds are stuck valued in fiat whilst waiting for ASICs to show up.

Bottom-line: a fairly small profit that materialises is worth a lot more than a huge profit that is just fantasy.

Well both pass-throughs are now live and there's been a decent amount of trade, especially on S.DICE.

Exchange-rate : 0.004 (it seems to be dropping through this having climbed back a little overnight).
Adjusted NAV/U : 24.8175
Bid at : 24.2
Higher bid (for those unhappy with the motion passed) : 25.4

The pass-throughs are making a slow but steady profit for us - and we realised some decent profit from S.Dice I bought before the motion was passed (when it became obvious price was going to break through to well over 5.0).  I also traded some profit for us on S.Dice.

We ran out of cash on CoinBR last night to keep selling more pass-through shares (deposits are manually approved - there were 3 there for operator when he logged in this morning).  I've increased the cash we use to operate the pass-throughs (pulled a bit from BitFUnder - where it was no longer needed as I've totally stopped trading S.Dice passthrough there and on BTC.Co).  If necessarily I'll sell some more bonds to increase capital available further - but will wait to see whether trade volume dies down before doing that (the cost of bonds is small to us - but ANY cost is less profit for us if we can get by without it).

I'm expecting this to be a record week for us in terms of profit (though maybe not in terms of actual trading profit - a decent chunk of current profit comes from the exchange-rate change though we're over 10% in actual trading profit already).

I'll be posting pass-through news in this thread (to avoid bumping multiple threads).

S.Dice saw a small drop overnight.  Up until just now there was one sell order significantly below the rest - so some LTC Global investors got some pretty cheap shares.  As I type I have the last of that batch up for sale - after which price will rise again to match the new lowest Ask (unless another cheap order shows up).  As LTC seems to just have started dropping again, price may rise as well due to that.

S.BBet still has around same trading ranges as yesterday.  Bids at .001,  Asks at .0013 then a big hole in asks up to .002.  Yesterday I obtained some at just over .001 and sold 1k of those at just over that (I bought 20 then someone else scooped the other 980 I sold).  Prices at moment reflect the lowest ask of ~.0013 but we DO have a bid up just over .001 and will sell some at that lower price if it gets filled.

Before buying shares in either pass-through I'd advise anyone to take a look at the markt for them on MPEx and at the exchange-rate and work out roughly what price you should be paying.  Because I'm trying to match the market as best I can, I can't leave large blocks sitting up unattended (too much risk to the fund) so at times the lowest asks on LTC Global will be from resellers - and they may not always be especially good deals.

The first small batch of S.BBET-PT are now up for sale.

Here's a link to the MPEx market:

http://mpex.co/?mpsic=S.BBET

As of right now:

Highest bid is at just over .001
Lowest ask is at .0012

But there's not much bid volume above .00083 and now many asks below .002

The price could easily move in either direction pretty severely and pretty majorly.

I've put 1k of them up at a price which reflects a listing of about .00105 BTC (I managed to get them through a buy order).  If those sell then the last ones I have will be listed at the usual reflection of the lowest Ask (unless I get more from a bid being filled).

This is absolutely NOT an investment for those want something safe and reliable.  It's a speculative investment in a new startup.

To put things in perspective, if my math is correct they'd need to turn over around 10k-12k BTC of bets per month for each ~1% dividends to investors at the price this first batch is up at (that'#s a very rough approximation and assume advertising income approximately covers costs - which may not be the case).  At present they've taken maybe 2K BTC in bets in the week they've been public.  Obviously the hope is that will grow as the site gains momentum - but there's no guarantee of that.

I think it has definite potential to do well (which would make the current price a steal) but a not insignificant risk of flopping (which would leave the shares near worthless).

He's still confirming them - only got my confirmation email of how many shares I have this week.