It is certainly not as profitable [longer term] as simply holding at this point but it does offer the advantage of capitalizing on the near-constant noise
The problem is here. Any trading strategy must be above buy-and-hold as a minimum criteria for consideration. And there are millions of strategies which are above buy-and-hold for only a very small amount of time (e.g. they all perform perfect on the backtesting data, but will make huge loss in a few days or weeks).
Though, there is one exception. Since the bitcoin market is just emerging, it may be inefficient and thus even simple algorithms would be profitable.
It's not a problem if you look at it as an investment of USD with a profit in USD. Sure, it's not as profitable as simply buying and holding BTC when BTC explodes; but it is a first-order derivative and when the price of BTC is stable, it performs much better than BTC itself. i.e., it's doing *very* well compared to BTC when the price of BTC holds at $15 for the last few weeks as it has. deltaBTC = 0, deltaDerivative > 0.
You can also look at this as a less-risky investment than BTC itself (i.e., more diversified--akin to a mutual fund) since at any given point in time, your position is half USD/half BTC (on average).
