Shares of bitcoin mining businesses are too expensive compared to owning the cryptocurrency directly, according to Sam Doctor, chief strategist at BitOoda and MarketWatch, a financial services platform for digital assets.

According to the expert, buying bitcoins directly is better than investing in cryptocurrency mining.

Just like in the mining industry, investors can calculate the enterprise value per unit of raw materials and compare it to the spot price of raw materials. The former will be lower because miners incur operating and capital costs.

According to Doctorow, the same scheme can be applied to cryptocurrency mining. Shares of publicly traded bitcoin miners on average trade at a BTC corporate value adjusted for reserves of $47,872, or 96% of the recent BTC spot price of $47,700 , according to a BitOoda report.

Their shares are much higher than in the oil or gold mining industries, “If miners are already so highly valued, and if the company’s value per bitcoin they will mine is already roughly equal to the spot price of bitcoin, then they have no margin for error.”

So miners’ shares will rise if the price of bitcoin also rises. But miners still have to pay for electricity, for replacing machines as new generations of equipment come out, and then there’s employee wages.