I buy through Coinbase too, but only if I am full BTC in my trading account. That is a bad, unbalanced position to be in and I took a loss just to get back in the game. I might have just waited longer and saved some money, but I only work in probabilities, not certainty. For day trading, CB is unworkable. You need a large exchange with lots of liquidity like bfx or Stamp.
I mention Coinbase b/c I initially get all my coins through them b/c they seem to be amongst the cheapest means to first acquire BTC for peeps in the USA. I agree with you for a variety of reasons that Coinbase is NOT set up to be a trading platform, and it would NOT function too well to attempt to use it in such a way, and one of the reasons is the fee is a bit high for that 1% on each end, and another reason is that you cannot customize orders to take place upon price movement, they have to be accomplished manually or at Coinbase's preset times.
So far, I only have one account set up that I can use for trading, and that is a BTC-e account. I have done a tiny bit of practice trading with that account; however, since I have NOT been sufficiently in the black with my BTC portfolio, and since I believe BTC prices are far below the "trendline," I consider trading to be an unwise option for my particular circumstances and viewpoint (however, I have it available in the event that I feel an urgent need to move from BTC to dollars (or possibly to some other currency) with decent fees .2%.
I am talking my book, but I'm honest about it.
It would be really foolish to be completely honest, and hopefully you realize that too. Most of the time, investors are NOT going to reveal their position, except in fairly vague and non-specific terms, until after they have already taken it. ... same is true for you.
I want the price to go down so I can get more coins. a crazy crash like the one on BTC-e aa few days ago to $309 is not out of the question. Unfortunately, I no longer have enough cash to place meaningful orders down to $1 like I once did.
Almost any time we can have those kinds of crazy crashes, yet they seem to be more prevalent during some kind of upturn in the market's volatility... and then when they happen, they seem to cause additional volatility and imbalance for a short period of time. Surely, it would be nice to have various orders placed on various exchanges in order to be able to profit from such irregularities when they do occur.
This is Bitcoin, the only thing steeper than the spikes and crashes is the learning curve.
Surely, various kinds of knowledge develops with additional experience(s), yet here you go again with a kind of gratuitous self-serving reference to your implied guru status. I will leave my comment a little vague for NOW; however, you should probably realize that some posters, including myself, will only have so much tolerance for those kinds of self-serving statements... but I will leave it alone for now, as I mentioned.
Prices have only gotten down to $502, so far, as I type - so accordingly, I am sticking with my earlier made prediction of possibly $480 to $490 in the next 12 hours... otherwise, maybe we will have another shot at these levels within the next 36 hours.... (meaning approximately 24 hours later - after bouncing back a bit)... and I guess since we are dragging into the weekend.. these kinds of prices and attempts to push downward may linger into the weekend... but I am having my doubts about anything lower than approximately $462... but wtf do I know?
EDIT:::: oh yeah, i forgot the mention... my agreement with you, that we should all be acting with probabilities and calculating our position(s) and exposure(s) based on how we view these probability calculations, and liekly a variety of us will come to different results based on our view of the probability and/or our abilities to calculate them and/or our risk tolerance(s) to them.