$17,500 for GPUs (~250 each back then) is a sizeable investment for sure, but if he spent that much money and risk LTC crashing, he would have had a major loss. But his 69 radeons? They are still worth plenty for gamers. A 7950 OC is still a great gaming card for many. Its the same argument, risk vs reward and how much risk are you willing to take on?
Btw, 69 x 7950s mining since the start of the year would have now already made him a fortune, regardless of whether he bought GPUs to mine or buy coins directly.
It's not $17.5k for GPUs, think of all the rigs and wiring and warehousing costs, power supply costs, CPU/mobo/RAM costs, electrical upgrade costs (most residential lines can't power many rigs, and even most C&I is going to have trouble with that much equipment), rack or case costs, power costs, cooling costs, risk of total loss due to fire/flood/theft/etc., and warehouse rental costs. The actual amount of money he put into mining was probably more like $100k including all of those costs including a year of power, warehouse rent, maintenance to replace failed cards, restart miners that went down, replace burned out PSUs and cards, etc. $100k in LTC bought when LTC was $2 would be worth about $7.2 million today.
The whole "mining is less risky" idea is only true for small-scale operations where you would have bought the GPU for some other purpose such as video games. If you buy MORE than that, you are now taking on risk. You are now speculating. Maybe not quite as much as someone who buys currency directly, but you're still speculating.
If someone breaks into your warehouse or whatever and steals it? Zero.
And if you are mining without knowing exactly what you're doing, you run the risk of burning down PSUs, burning everything you own down. How much is THAT worth to you to avoid? Heck, you'd probably liable to adjacent property owners for your electrical fire, so you probably go bankrupt from all the lawsuits and claims against you. (Your insurance likely doesn't cover weird stuff like masses of mining rigs.)
You think this doesn't happen? Let me tell you something--while I was replacing the panel on my rig, I didn't notice a wire had gotten moved. When I started up mining I left the room and came back a moment later because I left my phone in that room. I smelled burning. Turns out the wire caught in a GPU fan. Almost lost a very expensive GPU and possibly my entire rig due to ONE careless mistake. If I had not returned right away, I might have started a fire. Multiply that by 69 GPUs... what a headache.
I would much rather pocket $7.1 million with almost zero effort than tear my hair out babysitting tons of mining equipment that would take far longer to make $7.2 million if it ever does, especially as difficulty skyrockets. "But the temptation to sell" you say. Yeah so what, both traders and miners have to deal with such temptation. "But if LTC goes to zero" you say. Yeah so what, fire/flood/theft can wipe your miners out too, plus the maintenance and power costs and depreciation are going to be a huge headache. The point of having money is to ENJOY LIFE, not add more headaches to it.
Furthermore, if you prefer a trickle of income to buying coins, you can simply buy shares in companies that own mining rigs. And if buying coins at once scares you, you can dollar-cost-average them and buy like 1 coin a week instead of 52 coins at a time, just as one example.