I've recently got into Bitcoin and I really like it. I can see its benefits for everyone. I use it for purchases when available, but I am also trying to find a good way to invest. I'm not interested in cloud mining. Any suggestions?
Like many others have said just buying bitcoins is an investment in itself, especially in times where big currencys like the EUR & USD may be heading down or into a deep recession/depression that might last for many years. So investing some into precious metals like Gold, Platinum, Silver, agricultural land, forrest property, electricity producing equipment like solar panels windpower, digital currencys may be a very wise move to secure your assets if the paper money of your country may loose (most of) its value in the future.
In the btcinvestment sector there is many different stock exchanges but there hasent been a high number of stocks that has been profitable to just buy & hold so what you possibly could do is do things like arbitrage between different exchanges for basically garanteed profit if done right.
Its also possible to lend out digital currency, safest would of cource be in cases where the borrower have security to offer you, one can also lend to out in unsecured loans on lending sites like btcjam witch has around 1000 activated loans per month.
Btcjam post some stat from time to time about the performance, some months ago they mentioned that the overall repayment rate was 87% and that the repayment rate for A rated borrower had been 98% during 2014.
If you would have invested evenly on all A rated borrowers loan you would have made 22-28% profit during 2014 accourding to btcjams official numbers depending on if you invested in normal BTC loans or USD tied loans. For B rated borrowers the numbers were 18,38%/4,12%, C rated 13,65%/-1,05% and so on.
Lending out btc in unsecured loans is of course risky just like any investment in the btcworld is but If your able to avoid most of the loans that dont get payed back or only gets partially payed back or your able to collect the missing payments throu collecting agencys/courtsystem in the borrowers country you could of couse do way better than those numbers to but its a learning process to get to know what loans to invest in and what loans/borrowers to avoid. If you decide to try it out i recommend that you start with a learning period of a few months where you only invest small amount and evaluate your result so you get better at screening loans before investing bigger. Something like 50%-100% yearly interest is surely possible to achieve as a lender on btcjam if your good at it.