1) I want to be conscious and watching the movements happen when I buy my coins. I don't like buying on the way down, I want to buy as close to the bottom as possible. I feel I have a better chance of doing that if I am creating the orders at the time of the movement.
No, that is a bad idea, and you won't buy close to the bottom, and you have worse chance if you trade while looking at the moving ticker. Because psychology kicks in. You get scared / excited etc, any emotion destroys your ability to think resulting in poor trades.
Trust me, setting orders beforehand and not fucking with them later is the only way to get profit.
And coinbase is not an exchange, in case you didn't notice yet. It is a wallet where you can buy coins, but you don't trade there.
It has worked very well for me the past 3 times the market has fallen, I've been within $40-50 of the bottom. If I had bought all the way down, I can guarantee that my average cost per BTC would have been much higher than throwing it all down when the time is right. I do not think coin base is an exchange, I don't day trade Bitcoin. I buy it, hold it until it goes up or I think it is going down soon, sell, rinse and repeat. The fees have been nominal, and I don't trust BTC-e with thousands of dollars to pay 0.8% less in commissions when I buy or sell.
