Quote from: skivrmt on January 19, 2014, 05:16:09 PM

Simply not true. Major investment firms do not do this for a couple of reasons. One is the risk of being trustee on an assets they can't "control", like a mutual fund or stock. Two is fees. You can charge an IRA fee for holding alternative assets but its a lot harder to convince an investor to pay an asset management fee when all Morgan Stanley, Goldman etc is doing is providing an IRA.

I think people would gladly pay -- there is huge demand out there.

I looked into this for years when I was doing retail investments -- the main challenge is that the accounting is nearly impossible -- if the IRA LLC buys a small apartment building, separating the expenses of repairs, upkeep, income from rents etc. in a way that satisfies the IRS is very tough.

For Bitcoin the challenges would be great as well....suppose someone put those bitcoin in MtGox through the IRA LLC....then traded.....they could easily jury rig the trades so all profitable trades were accounted to the IRA and all unprofitable ones accounted to a regular account.....then they'd have a large loss in the taxable account and the IRA would have all the (tax deffered) gains. The only way the IRS could be satisfied that this wasn't the case is to 1) receive an audit of the owners Mt Gox account and 2) audit the other related accounts of that person --- if there are transfers back and forth from Coinbase etc. it's even harder.

Make it more simple: suppose Joes IRA LLC only buys and holds and that's it..... if he bought Bitcoin for $134, $300, $800 and $900 during 2013.... what is to prevent him from claiming all purchases at $134 and ignoring the $900?

Better yet.....Steve is a brilliant free state guy.....he bought $10,000 worth of Bitcoin at $10 and he has an existing IRA LLC for his real estate business.....what's to stop him TODAY when he files his taxes on claiming those were done on behalf of his IRA

Better yet, how about someone finding someone with Bitcoin they've held for a couple years and making a dummy receipt from Jan 5, 2013 payable to the person from the LLC.

The big firms always want a way to make a buck....if they could they would for sure at least offer it.

I've never ever seen it work other than for ultra wealthy.