As I said a few posts ago. I was NOT trading at all during the past 3 weeks.
I do not, and never have, used a bot or stoploss or any other form of automated trading.
Sure, sometimes you lose a little, and it can be frustrating as hell when the price drops overnight, but that is part of the market.
The price of the commodity will always be higher than that of the hardware...otherwise nobody would bother purchasing hardware until the commodity price increased due to excessive demand. This does not mean that the market price at Cex.io is artificial, or manipulated beyond the normal operations of the market forces.
In all that time I have GAINED btc with little trading, [...]
That part sounded otherwise, hence my comment (?)
I do understand the services associated with cloud mining will naturally yield a somewhat higher price (after all, it's fully hosted), but that should be limited to a percentage that makes up for that (i.e. something like 30-50% that both covers cost and generates profits).
Seeing the cex.io move between 250% to >400% of the typical market hardware price for profitable miners, however, is something of entirely different nature. Given that only a small fraction of available mining power is actually rented out at any given time supports that.
Anyway, in the last 18 days we did not see any price drop (rather the opposite due to the typical upwards manipulation that you label "free market price movement" at your choice), hence that time period clearly resulted in profits.
Cex.io often has time periods with no price decline. However, these do end (since their current price is
way too high given hardware market conditions that they supposedly compete with), the tensions for a waterfall drop are already very high again.
The longer the price moves manipulated upwards against free market forces, the higher the tensions between manipulation and free market.
Thus the more pronounced the price drop/crash (eventually reality reasserts itself to some extend), when insiders dump at good price and high volume (leaving all others holding the bag) and then resuming buying at the resulting overshoot to the downside - rinse, repeat, cycle, excellent profits for a few insiders, while all others lose. That's the pump&dump scheme I observed numerous times over there, as it just keeps repeating like clockwork.
The risks and eventually losses typically set in after mining and holding the GHs for longer periods of time, i.e. 1 month or longer.
After 2 months, every BTC you mined there will have typically turned into a loss (or 0-sum if you're very lucky) due to GHs price decline. Mining even longer than that without trading turns into cumulating losses that increase over time. That's basically all.
Successful trading is the only strategy that can negate the losses generated by holding their Ghs over longer times or during any price drops.