fcmatt, that is correct in the sense that I had a stop buy order at 5.065, but the order was placed at a base price of 5.47.

How do you go about the manual way of things then, if I may ask? I simply use bitcoinica since it allows for shorting, going in on margin, etc. and haven't been trading long (began watching bitcoins in December, began trading last month), so I am not completely up to date with other forms of placing stops, limits, trailing stops, etc. on different sites or in a "manual" sense. Thank you for the help though, or pointing that out. If you have a different method to minimize such occurrences then I would certainly be intrigued.

I second that opinion for sure! My new position base flew past my trigger point by 40 cents during the major move up

Bitcoinica is back up, no worries.

Come on momentum! Don't stop now!

We are sadly very consistent at this point, just a lot of barcoding going on inside btccharts.com. But predictions are still upward!

Head on over to the mining section and the beginners guide. Inside there is a listing of pools with their information linked. All you have to do is check out their viewer ratings (such as positive posts on their thread) and make the personal decision to which you'd like to be with. I'm with slush now and it puts out some continuous numbers so no problems there, but feel free to explore around and check the site to each pool.

I wonder how the new Nvidia cards will compare coming out this year (the 6xx series). Running a GTX 570 and getting around 152Mhash/s, but that was after a free 30Mhash/s increase with the new WHQL drivers. Can only imagine what they have coming after seeing some leaked numbers.

Now that right there is a real man! Would love to go hunting with you sometime

Certainly here for the enjoyment of market analysis, specifically technical analysis, which has had me hooked on bitcoincharts.com, btccharts.com, bitcoinica.com, mtgox.com, etc all at the same time at all times of day! (like now, 3:30AM)

Ready for the walls to be GONE and never come back! (to this degree at least, and for a very long time) UP UP UP!!!

   The best thing to do, in my opinion, would be to start reading into some technical analysis and charting information either in the form of books (which are all over the place such as amazon, or a simple google search), or other threads like GoomBoo's Journal in the Economy>Economics>Speculation area of the forums. Of course, GoomBoo's journal is more along the side of intro traders, but he still explains the use of charting (and how to get charts that look like his do) very well, boiled down to a simplified approach. Besides the fact that he does a nice job of explaining his methods, he has a lot of nice references to great books that can be read covering many different areas.
   Other than that (getting out there and just seeing what turns up on the internet), go ahead and check out some of the charting sites like btccharts.com, or bitcoincharts.com, and the charts area of bitcoinica.com. Btccharts.com is less informative about the information, but exploring bitcoincharts.com was where I began looking into Bitcoin charting. Finally, you may want to look into investopedia.com or another investing site to help improve your investing vocabulary, because after all, bitcoins are just another currency or security that is traded and follows technical analysis to a T (most of the time...) 
   (An exception would be currently with the introduction of manipulators into the market, hence the ask walls)