All these "bitcoin" investment funds are just making bitcoin move with the stock market. It correlates bitcoin to all the other wall street toys. Traders panic on some foreign debt problem, like today, and bitcoin goes down with the market when it should be going up with gold.
They might even be artificially expanding bitcoin liquidity with all their off-blockchain artificial bitcoin and keeping prices down. Whatever they are they are not bitcoin, you buy bitcoin and it's on the blockchain, these things are artificial bitcoin and are not on the blockchain... there's not a 21 million coin programmed limit on these things, it's limited only by what wall street can get away with and they can get away with a lot.
I've been saying these are a bad thing from the start and I'm worried I'm right. If you don't have the private key, you don't have the bitcoin, period.
I'm not sure I understand your point 2good2betrue. If a fund buys BTC and you own shares in that fund, how is that materially different from, say an investor buying shares in a Gold ETF because it's easier than buying physical gold in a vault for an individual? Or a money-market fund as an alternative to depositing all your cash with one bank?