Thanks for the feedback on my post guys. As a few people responded to it, I'll try to address all follow-up comments in this post:
Putting a few hundred thousand dollars into an investment like bitcoin would be something I'd be happy to do - the risk adjusted returns are within my risk profile. I haven't. The reason is I don't trust any of the exchanges.
Thanks for your input. But I don't think I understand your position. If you would be happy to buy and hodl (as per your statement), rather than HFT, why wold you not: transfer whatever amount you are comfortable to an exchange (e.g. $5000?); buy XBT with the USD; withdraw the XBT to your personal wallet on your computer; rinse and repeat until you've exchanged your hundreds of thousands? You exposure to counterparty risk can be limited to whatever figure you keep on the exchange at any one time.
Alternately, if you really want to take a position of hundreds of thousands, I would imagine you might be interesting to someone like BitPay, whose biz model requires a regular source of $ for which they would provide XBT. You might contact them directly and ask.
This definitely would make me feel comfortable with the amount of risk, but it's a lot of work, even for someone like me who I'd only consider a small investor in comparison to general Wall Street types you guys are after. For example, a typical position size in any particular given stock for me on any given day may be ~mid six-figures. To acquire that $ amount of bitcoins by the method you mentioned, I'd have to "rinse and repeat" 100+ times. If each time even took only a single day, that's still 3+ months to enter a position. And that's for someone like me who is pretty small potatoes in the Wall Street world. Let alone the fact that Wall Street people tend to make a decent amount of money, so dealing with that every day has a high real-dollar opportunity cost in terms of their time. And that's just for a small/mid-sized investor like myself. Large funds are the type you'd really want, and they'd come in and pick up 10, 20, 30 million dollars of BTC at a time. That'd never work for them. You need a way that an investor can come safely and buy up BTC all in one go.
Wall street types are happy to accept financial risk, but aren't very fond of counterparty risk, especially if we can't hedge it off onto someone else. At the moment that's not particularly possible. If you got even a single reputable financial institution (bank, equity/commodity exchange, something of that nature) to operate a BTC exchange, we'd come flocking.
You could always buy from SecondMarket... Check them out.
SecondMarket is actually probably a good option - I wasn't aware of them being an option at all in fact, didn't know their exchange had launched yet. They're a known quantity nowadays in the private-company-shares market, as many large institutional investors have conducted business with them for the past couple of years in trading private shares. They have a track record of not just running away with your money, and also of not getting hacked (thus far, heh). Their involvement in BTC will be very positive for the bitcoin community, imho.
Don't understand your point? If you want buy and hold you don't must leave your coins/money at any untrustful exchange. Buy few coins and send the coins to you wallet and keep the coins safe. Or buy at local Bitcoin seller, or buy in many steps small amounts at any exchanger (even to avoid to affect the price with your hundreds or millions of $$
)...or or or... Many many possible and safe ways to do...Easy as that...
If you are that big stockmarket trader as you say (doubts are allowed) you might be able to handle risk of small amounts. You gonna lose same or more at stock market trades everyday.
Same as above, that's just not realistic for the type of investment you guys want to get from Wall Street -- you want to make it easy for people to acquire large quantities of bitcoins all at once (millions of dollars). Local isn't a realistic option for both that reason, and hassle, and probably legal reasons. As far as not "leaving the BTC on the exchange" -- I agree with you 100% there, and never was advocating leaving any assets at the exchange for an extended period of time at all. But even a couple hours of having Mt Gox have any large quantity of my money for instance would be too much and deter me from trading it.
Well I guess he wants to do it at once as he is used to with more established financial institutions.
I kinda can see why an Wall Street investor will have problems wiring money to Japan to the company of a fat 29 year old jerk.
Even in $50k increments.
Very well said
That's total bullshit, counterparty risk is the only reason you won't get into btc lol.
Find some miners who will sell you blocks, go on localbitcoins, there are people offering up to $100,000 trades actually located on Wall street.
You're basically just shilling for secondmarket, or you'll announce soon that wannabe investors no longer need worry about counterparty risk because.....some company you're involved with has sorted out this issue you have created.
I wasn't even aware the SecondMarket exchange had launched, and I have no companies involved in BTC at all atm, nor do I plan on launching any at the moment, so no worries there hah. I have no agenda here, I've never even conducted a single trade on any exchange with bitcoin. Just trying to give some insight into how people who work in my world think about things like this, thats all. Localbitcoins is an absurd option to me for a wall street type trade.
tl;dr: You want to make it as safe and easy as possible for large institutional investors to come and buy bitcoins. Not $5k at a time, not $50k at a time, not even $100k at a time. You want the guy who runs a $2 billion dollar fund and wants to allocate $20 million of it to bitcoin to come in and be able to deposit $20 mil at the exchange and run a TWAP buy algorithm over the following few days and get his whole position in one swoop from one exchange. That's how you get real wall street money involved, and that real wall street money would probably crank the BTC price wayyyy up. 
