We are in the "early/pricing" stage of an exponentially growing (later: S-growing) phenomenon. If everything goes as it has done in several bubbles before, the great bubble will form when 1-2% of the population had adopted the technology. For Bitcoin, this means about 50 million adapters that actually use bitcoin for something. This "something" has so far been lagging, though.

I withdrew my prediction for $300 for 2013, but this does not mean that I was sure it will not happen. In 2014 it will happen for sure. Or some 1.5-sigma event happens.

The great moves have been able to push the price up roughly by an order of magnitude. We need 4 such moves and the rest of this year is not long enough time. April-June 2014 is now my target.

Current price I would just buy as much as I can.

Bearish triangle closing very soon. Up or down?

I say down, but I don't discard breaking $110 for a while before the crash to double digits. I speculated a bit between yesterday and today, bought at 77€ and sold between 81.22€ and 81.77€ during last night and this morning. Volume very low, not easy at all to trade +150BTC ATM avoiding slippage.

You just quoted his entire post, how is he supposed to edit that away?

ehehhehe - Great point. I think he meant to add "I'm not editing if you're not editing!" 

Just thought I would introduce myself, since I haven't been on this forum very long, although I have been reading it for the last several thousand posts.

I'm in Australia (but not Australian), I heard about bitcoins through traditional media back in April.  It sparked my interest but I was too busy to be able to allocate any significant time to investigating further.  I speculatively bought in at the beginning of May when price was £60 (sorry, I trade in GBP), having just missed £50.  Watched price go up to £87 at the end of May, didn't sell (regretfully) and then watched it drop to £70, at which point I cashed out.  Made a tidy profit (almost entirely by luck) but not as much as it could have been, but that's trading for you.

I'm a trader by day job (commodities, FOREX) and so I was very interested to see what was happening with bitcoin.  Some observations that I thought I'd share with you, primarily to give you an insight into the perspective of a non-mining, non-IT guy with little knowledge of bitcoin but extensive knowledge of traditional markets (and these are the probbaly the same type of guys who are currently manipulating the bitcoin value):

* bitcoin can be compared to neither commodities nor fiat currency at this stage.  It doesn't have the trading volume to be considered a currency (you can't get in and out quickly and you can't use leverage) and it doesn't have a substantial supply/demand market, nor a real 'use' (yet) to be considered comparable to a commodity
* as such, drawing any kind of line on a chart is utterly pointless, since the usual 'rules' (which are dubious in any case) certainly won't apply here.  Even more so considering that past history (pre-April, say) did not include many traders such as myself.  Now it does, so previous trends can be ignored since we now have a lot of price manipulation going on
* price movements are currently being caused entirely by speculation (or 99% at least)
* steady, sustainable price growth will only occur with a much higher volume of trades and with mass adoption
* the volatility of the price is what has attracted day/short term traders
* the illiquidity of the market is what has caused fiat to leave in recent weeks (this was my reason, it became too difficult to capitalise on price fluctuations unless they were arounf 5% due to lack of bid volume)

So, my conclusion (as unhelpful as it is) is that nobody can predict the price of bitcoin since it does not follow any traditional rules.  As such, you can dive in and then jump out again, over a period of time, with a 50/50 chance of making a gain.  Unless you have a very large holding through which you can temporarily manipulate the price.

I'm currently 100% fiat again, looking for a suitable price to buy back in (very speculatively, I'm looking at something around USD52, since I think USD50 will be a psychological trigger with mass-buy in, that will see the beginning of a steady, sustainable, non-bubbled climb)

Having said all this, the more I learn about bitcoin, the more I think that it has fantastic potential.  However, you simply can't allow emotion to influence your position.  Anyone who is trading based on the "bitcoin ideology" is, frankly, exceptionally foolish. Holding some bitcoins that you can afford to lose, in the hope that a bitcoin will be worth $1k in a few years, is fine.  Holding some bitcoins that you can't afford to lose, in the hope that a bitcoin will be worth $1k in a few years, is absurd.

I appreciate that posters get shot down for all sorts of reasons here but I'm just sharing with you what I believe, based on my experience of traditional trading.  I don't know anything about mining, bitcoin history or the current or future impact of Silk Road, and as a trader nor am I really that interested. Hope it helps and more than happy to discuss further.

And a final thing - should I make Jaroslaw my first ignoree?!

Appreciated post and welcome. I tend to agree with most that you said. In particular we have to be careful with TA and BTC, in can turn on a dime for no reason.
Can't comment on Jaroslaw. I have never ignored a poster as I think there is occasionally truth in the false, so I don't like to filter information. Though, at times, it certainly gets tough ;-)

Good post. Nice one.

As you have eluded to the pro trading interest currently.....what do you think is stopping a few well-backed traders, from completely owning the manipulation thats possible on the Gox order book? Would seem an interesting project from a quant's point of view, dont you think?  

already 10 post and you did not ignored Jaroslaw yet? cmon   welcome

Are you expecting at least one 10-fold move this year, though?