But you are speculating is my point. Yes, underlying is some capital asset that can be sold for a loss to recoup some of the investment. If coin markets crash to zero, expect more than 30% loss maybe 50% as gpus flood the market. So my point is with mining you are essentially speculating with 30%-50% of the capital you invest in hardware anyway and you are speculating prices will rise. so just buy the coin and you don't need mining to geek out, plenty of other ways to scratch that itch.
Your margin of error in speculating will be minimized. Lets say right now you get a rig for ETH, 1070's, you can expect to pay that rig off in 6 months, even it goes down or up based on speculation there will be a 1 month variation to both sides. Now if this was 3 months ago, the pay out was 4 month turn around to pay the rig off, and when Eth dropped that is when it went to 6 months, and has been staying steady since then. And with Bitcoin and Light coin craze 6 months per rig was pretty much what we were looking at as a turn around. All these guys making the algorithms and coins are creating difficulties to stay around that 6 month time frame.
Now lets say I bought eth at 380 bucks expecting it to go much higher, yeah it went past 400, but that 10% gain would have turned to a 50% loss when Eth immediately when back down to the DDOS attacks on Kracken after a major sell off of Eth. There are no regulations to stop things like this. Once something like that happens if your investing in coins you can loose your shirt, many people that day lost a good chuck of change on their positions. At least in the stock market or Forex there are balancing forces that the government implements to stop those things from happening. With coins there are no checks and balances.....