I was able to net .09 btc after fees on that trade.

Woohoo.  that's like .57

Well, it's cool to see it works.

Mtgox made a few bucks at least.

Except all the people on the other side of those trades .

I think people are really over-analyzing the effect of Goomboo's thread. IMHO we are simply seeing a state of faux-stability set on by the mini-crash a few days ago leading to a sense of confusion and lack of confidence in the market among traders who have decided to sit on the sidelines until the market indicates it is going one way or another. Another factor leading to such small trading volume has been the Chinese New Year, which more then likely kept many Asian traders out of the market this past weekend.

These indicators that Goomboo is using have been around for a long time and any smart/experienced trader would have already had them as part of their arsenal long before this thread came about. Besides anyone smart knows that it is incredibly stupid to rely on a single market indicator when trading, you gotta mix things up a bit and utilize a range of tools in your arsenal to make the most informed decision possible or else you are engaging in the trading equivalent of a soldier following a blind-man into battle.

Yeah, only price pays so even if something doesn't "make sense", it doesn't mean that you should ignore signals which have been shown to be profitable in the past.

Take the Nasdaq as an example.  In the late 1990s, it was considered to be overvalued.  If a trader were to make a trade simply by the "economics" of the situation and argue with the madness of the market, he would have shorted and experienced a >100% loss on his trade.  However, for the trader who simply followed the trend, across the following months he could have doubled his investment.

That is entirely based upon user preference risk tolerance.  If I miss an entry into a trade, I will wait until a pullback/throwback/retracement before shorting.  In traditional markets, every time I panic and hit the buy or sell trigger without waiting for a retracement, I almost always kick myself because a better entry afforded itself later in the trade.

Basically the market is a grinding battle between the bulls and the bears and profit taking from longs and shorts allows a temporary movement away from the immediate trend.  If you watch a traditional market, you will see volume dry up during the beginning of retracements and a large surge in volume during the candles in which the trend resumes.  Basically, this is from patient traders who missed the initial entry or are adding to their existing position (pyramiding).

To learn more about retracements, check the below link.  In the author's chart, point A is the golden opportunity to enter the trade because the breakout occurred and price retraced to previous support allowing them the ability to short with very little price-risk.

http://thetradequest.com/retracements.html

You always need a failsafe point for a trade.  A failsafe point is basically a well-thoughout location which essentially says, "if I miss the initial entry, where will I enter the trend"?  The idea here is that if you are out of the market and the market goes up thousands of percentage points (last year), you don't want to be on the sidelines.

In The Turtle System (check one of my earlier posts in this thread), the Turtles would buy or sell when prices reached a new 20 day high or low.  There was a catch though - if the last trade was would have been profitable, they ignored the trade, believing that it would probably chop around.  However, to prevent themselves from missing out on a runaway trend, they had a failsafe long/short location equal to the 55 day high low.  If they were out of a trade and a new 55 day high low were made, they would enter in the direction of the trade.

Just like BTC launches new coins into the market every 10 minutes at an even higher percentage increase than most stocks on the market (excluding penny stocks)?

How does the transfer-ability of stocks contribute to or subtract from their value?  Additionally, note the dryness of my post?  I'm clearly telling the initial author that his reason of "only 21 million" is hollow.

Additionally, we have covered this - excluding speculative bubbles, currencies aren't a traditional "retirement" class investment since there is no directional bias - a fundamental building block of risky investments.  By risk I mean variance of returns - the idea is that you should only assume higher units of risk if you potentially expect higher units of reward.

Furthermore, let's go into his investment logic.
-He believed that in 30 years, the price would be $10.
-Taking the current market price of $6.27, compounding it across 30 years yields an annual percentage return of 1.72%.
-The current 30 year U.S. bond rate of return is 3.15% YTM.
-YTM is an approximation of what you would actually earn across the time period, but it's roughly twice what he expects with significantly less risk.
-For a 30 year time period, does it make sense to invest in something which offers half of the "risk-free" rate of return?

Bond yields:

http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/mdc_bonds.html?mod=mdc_topnav_2_3000

I used the SMA - there's a silly rule in trading - if you're new, you stick with the system, if you're old, you know when you can adapt the system :p.  Basically on the surface it's hypocritical, but with experience you will begin to see times when it is appropriate to modify.

Here's my reasoning for using the SMA and not the EMA in that specific incident
-I looked at price-action and saw that we were in a prolonged trading range...if price goes above this trading range, we'll be in an uptrend, if it goes down, we'll be in a temporary downtrend until we break $4.60 (low of prior retracement)
-There really isn't much different between the two moving averages - EMA uses a smoothing factor with SMA is just a normal average
-I don't have time to monitor anything shorter than daily charts during the trading week and BTC movements are typically explosive and short-lived (not much follow through)
-SMA 10/21 generated a signal at the time of write - an excellent opportunity for me to short at a reasonable spot within the range

I'm happy that you are sticking with a plan!

One of my favorite feelings in the market is losing less than I normally would have - it's just below earning a profit on a trade

I agree (to the over-emphasis on the strategy) - it's a just moving average crossover system -> one of the most basic trading systems out there.  If you pick up a technical analysis book on trading strategies, this is probably the first one you'll come across.  As I've said in an earlier post, if you use it consistently, it works.  Across the past 10 years, it's delivered an 70% return while the S&P 500 is relatively flat.

I agree with you about using a single tool to an extent - if your objective is to get a nail into a piece of wood, then a hammer does a pretty good job.  Basically what I'm getting at is that if you:
-Know how to use a single tool
-Have tested this tool
-Can use it even when it seems to not be working
-You can come out ahead

So I don't think there is anything wrong with using a single tool - as long as you use some other tools to test the validity of your tool in the first place!

Here's a little known factoid about the industry: most of the consistently successful individuals in this industry use simple tools and don't complicate things.  Very few traders actually earn a consistent profit switching from idea to idea chasing what worked in the past.  Most failed traders trade a system until it "stops working" and then run to what was just working well.  Look back over the historical performance of the moving average crossover system.  Notice something interesting in the equity curve?  It didn't make money for over a year.  You would have set there, taking trade after trade, and not have reached new highs in your account balance for over a year.  However, if you stuck with it, you eventually would have knocked the S&P 500 out of the ballpark.