If you are solely going to stick to the very narrow definition of "investing = buying at the IPO price and holding for ever" then sure.  But that's not the commonly accepted definition.  Investing is a process of continuous decision making dependent on the market conditions at the time.  And if you can't accept that, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.

To elaborate a bit, i run an automated market making algorithm on various exchanges, currently mostly on Havelock.  The bid-offer on BTC securities is large enough, and the trading fees low enough, that such algos are usually profitable without insane amounts of leverage.  The algo on average makes about 100 trades a day.

It's not all rosy though.  The particular strategy has a few problems:

• Vulnerable to sudden downward shocks in price.  For example, the crash in ASICMINER assets contributed to the drop in portfolio value at the end of May.
• Critically depends on how wide the bid-offer is compared to trading fees.  In the last two months on Havelock, the algo paid out 1.922 BTC in fees; if the fees were just a few tenth of a percent higher, this strategy will not work.  In this respect, running this strat on GLBSE was much more profitable: the algo is always a liquidity provider, and on GLBSE, only the liquidity taker paid the fees.
• Exchange operator risk: the strat is dependent on the proper functioning of the exchange.  E.g., I lost about 70% of my total profit on GLBSE when that exchange shut down.
• The strat has a relatively small capacity.  This is largely dependent on the volume on the exchanges.  The algo already accounts for a significant fraction of all trades on Havelock (>20% of non-IPO volume), so there's not much upside to its run rate unless the volume goes up significantly.

Point is, there are ways to make money on BTC securities.  Right now, there is a good balance of market inefficiencies (read: profit potential) and volume that is not available in most other places (this strat does not work well in the BTC/USD market, for example). 

say whatever you want, I'm the one with 2 more BTC than when I started.   Though I did this in GLBSE as well...

Smart investors know when to buy and sell.  You are assuming buy and hold, which is the dumbest thing you can do in the current situation.

PM me if you want the complete trading history.

This is why I "invest"



That's my actual pnl, all securities valued at bid price, all on Havelock.

Though, I'll admit, there's nothing special about Havelock.  I can do this pretty much anywhere in BTC land as long as the exchange provides a trading API.

Hi all, long time lurker here finally making an account.