After closely watching a failed investment/Ponzi scam on this site, me and two buddies (the "brain trust") are sitting here with some drinks and a spreadsheet talking about what made us successful for 35 months straight. We have some ideas but we'd like to hear your ideas for improvement as well.

Before I give the bullet points, you should know that we have been investing together for basically three years. We have known each other for longer than that. Anyway, we each make $20-$30 USD profit per month. We are each investing our original $500 each month on the 15th. We've broken-even maybe twice but never experienced a principal loss. We had one month with a HUGE gain but that was simply luck. We purchase discounted gift/prepaid cards and sell them at a premium. We have systems in place to minimize our risk by 60%+. We never lose our original investment but our profit does vary from month-to-month. We don't guarantee a profit percent per month but we do guarantee the original investment 0f $500 (between the three of us, we will cover it for the members if all else fails.) Our average profit is $20-$30 per month, per member. We think our system is good but we're looking for ways to improve. What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong?


- We keep each investment group limited to 20 people
- Each person invests $500 (.05 BTC right now). No person can put in more or less
- Everything is converting to USD at the time of transaction
- Everything is paid out in USD
- We think a $10,000 total investment portfolio is financially healthy for one investment group. (Better said, we can easily cover $10,000 between the three of us.)
- We have a policy in place on how to purchase and sell gift/prepaid cards
- We don't purchase a gift/prepaid cards greater than 80% of value
- We have mechanisms in place to immediately cash out/sell the cards we accept before sending BTC (the 'you send first mentality'). We zero out the specific cards the moment the other party accepts and we send BTC. We even use escrow with success.
- Sometimes we buy BTC for PayPal USD (with a profit margin, of course)
- We have zero nuisance/scam complaints. Everyone receives their BTC; we receive our cash value
- Payouts to investment members are on the 14th of the month in USD via PayPal
- Paul is the payout guy (for the record)
- Reinvestment is on the 15th of the month (none of us remember why we picked the 15th. We think it was because of Rob's pay cycle, but we really don't remember. Rob's not here right now because he's dealing with his oldest son's death on Monday.)


As I mentioned there are three of us here. Josh is the one sitting here thinking we could be more profitable. Your thoughts?

[Personally, TraderMJK thinks we don't need a flat $500 USD per person and can accept any amount per person with unit valuation. I do believe in the $10,000 total pool for the group. Paul thinks it's too much work for him to pay out.]