No one knows how the BTC BIP 148 controversy will play out. IMO, now is not the time to be buying or selling coins until that has played out. ETH was trading at less than $50 just three months ago and there is no reason it couldn't go back to that level, especially since no one knows how the planned forks will play out. If you think you can catch a falling knife, then go ahead and invest directly in ETH. The difference is by investing directly you are risking your investment loses value and you are left holding the bag. A mining rig is and always has been a hedge, as it has a value other than mining and can always be used to create value by mining other coins.
Buying a rig at prices that are at least 1.5x what they were 3-4 months ago is insane. You can't just base the price off of MSRP either, as I was buying GPUs for $20-$30 less than MSRP before the shortage and resulting run-up in hardware price.
No, one does not know what will happen with future price, but as I said buying a rig also entails the same speculation that buying coins outright does, as in both scenarios you are relying on a recovery to break even or profit.
As far as a hedge and switching to other coins, if ETH drops to sub $50 level for any length of time, do you not think other people have also figured out to move to other coins? There will be no profitable GPU coin to mine for quite sometime as the space is saturated with hash-rate already. The slow bleed down is prolonging the end result, but no matter what happens mining profits will be on the decline for some time to come.
Plus if ETH does drop to $50 what I said above would make even more sense as he could buy 40 coins for the same money that he is planning to spend for a rig, which would takeover 800 days to mine at current difficulty. The days of easy mining are over, the best those of us with paid off rigs can hope for is a few more months of some profits before the long lull.
Also relying on selling off the hardware as an escape is not a good idea either, as I think we will be seeing a flood of used gear on the market in the next couple of months.