Here’s one easy way to get exposure to bitcoin ahead of the Winklevoss ETF

Interested in some investment exposure to bitcoin but too impatient to wait for the Winklevoss twins to get regulatory approval for their first-of-its-kind Bitcoin Trustexchange-traded fund?
There’s at least one way for investors to get a piece of cryptocurrencies and the even newer concept of blockchain, the shared payments database underpinning digital currencies. Although no ETF or mutual fund currently offers direct exposure to bitcoin – a decentralized digital payment system whose value fluctuates, sometimes wildly, like a traded security or a conventional currency – some small firms are providing a taste of indirect exposure through the Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT).
Two actively managed ETFs from ARK Invest include the trust as a holding: the ARK Web x.0 ETF ARKW, 0.00% and the ARK Innovation ETF ARKK, 0.00% Both also hold traditional equities as components and stress a focus on mobile and cloud-computing technology, according to a FactSet analysis. On the mutual-fund side, four of the eight offerings from Kinetics Mutual Funds hold shares of BIT, albeit in very small amounts. BIT, which trades on the over-the-counter market, operates as a private, open-ended trust that invests solely in bitcoin, with the value of its shares entirely derived from price moves in bitcoin, according to filings made by the trust. Each share initially represents 1/10th of a bitcoin, but that amount diminishes over time as the trust sells and distributes bitcoin in order to pay for expenses. Stakes are sold in blocks of 100 shares.

This post was published at Market Watch on Aug 29, 2016.