Is it the size of my ego or why Monero seems to gravitate towards me?  

P.S. I am raising Moneros to Heuristic. Please feel free to tip him directly with the adress on my signature box.

Seriously my man!
It is like: "I prefer buying XMR at 1.45 USD each instead of 1.53 usd.

The big rise probably starts when Monero make ATH as a strong base point and the players are 100 % convinced XMR is at bull trend with all the measures.

Bargain.

The block time is 2 minutes, it used to be 1 minute. Meaning, there are 720 blocks per day (used to be 1440).
The total emission was not touched - the block reward was readjusted according to the change of the # of blocks.

I recommend saving into XMR, and only the amount of money you do not need soon.
Monero is basically a project that will take 10-20 years to realize the real value (and if everything goes as planned the target value of XMR is much more than 25-50 usd). Monero can go beyond 1 000 000 usd per coin, but that is in the long long long run. In short run it is possible to reach 25-50 usd per coin (short run means from a few months to 1-2 years).

Well, in the first place. You do not want to trade with 97 % of coins (unless there is an option to short).
Then you seek the momentum when to enter the trade. Shorting is a tricky play with pump'n'dump since nobody can predict how far it goes exactly and the risk is you get margin called before it starts to drop.
However, when it starts to drop and it is a clear pump'n'dump scheme the gambling community are running, then you just start to selling when you see threads: "XYZ coin is a scam, beware".

The other common mistake is to fall in love with your position. If you have pre-determined to stick with certain position and the position is wrong, then you pretty much let the losses run.
I find it harder to teach trading (I made my living with day trading in 2009 in Oslo stock exchange, I made a decent money with it - better than in working but at some point the stock started to run too fast and I lost my interest and went back to real work).

I should have had been more specific: money here is crypto (XMR or BTC). Not fiat in this case, I try to keep fiat and crypto separate.
I have increased my networth with swing trading XMR-BTC pair. Actually trading it has been the only way to make money with it. Investing has been pretty bad (unless you did not initially buy at 0.001-0.002 levels).
I have made some bad calls obviously but it is enough 51 % of calls are accurate and in case of inaccuracy you cut the loss as fast as possible and when the call is right, let the profit run long enough.

The money I have been making by trading has been used acquiring Monero. Now there is an opportunity to lend XMR to others so I do not need to take too much risk of the fluctuations but still I am able to make money so I do not have an urgency to play pump and dump game also from that matter. And when there will be more opportunities to lend XMR with collateral and high rates, I am willing to employ part of my coins into that purpose, I like to rake/squeeze as many XMR as possible and hold them tight. I do not have any need to spend those coins, currently I am making more than enough in fiat so I do not need to sell my cryptos but I can accumulate more (prefertably by lending/investing).

Yes, I am very modest guy as you can see. 

One more mistake I made: I remained slightly too long bullish a year ago but once the price broke a support I sold around 0.003 and after I did  I told also others to do and so they did.

Sounds very reasonable.

I actually issued yesterday a warning about the rise of Monero and I told the shorters to start covering.. It did not take long after the price started to rise. And this is not an illusion but the truth.
Generally I have been pretty accurate in my views and people following my predictions have good odds to make actually some real money.

To be honest, I am not so sure if I am a perma bull but certainly a bagholder. 
2014-2015 were years of high emission. Therefore if the price rose it was an opportunity to sell and waite a little bit so that you were able to rebuy lower... Now if we start dumping I see it a bit of failure as the community is not able to keep up the marketcap with the current inflation which is not big.

I have been in XMR for the long haul pretty much since the beginning but I played some pump'n'dump games with it (and it was funny to read as some people freaked out when I turned my colors from green to red and from red to green).  Much entertainment. Much good time. 

I do not know you but personally I am not worried about the price of XMR. The rise has not been bubblish 30 % a day for a couple weeks but pretty slow and steady (a sudden pump + consolidation, pump + consolidation, rinse and repeat). In that way it is possible to bring the price pretty much up for ever (obviously later the pumps are not that sharp as they are now when price is still sub 1000 usd or so).
I personally prefer a coin that pumps for ever. Theoretically Monero type of currency should be one as the coin is slightly deflationary in the future (the overall long-term economic growth is ca 2 % pa and the inflation of XMR will probably be lower than this).

In the beginning the rises are pretty steap as even small increase in demand will drive the price crazy (XMR is pretty illiquid at these low levels). When the price is higher, also if person needs to buy a house/a space yacht etc it will not crash the price.

I was here last year - despite the charts are looking very similar, I see some major differences (not the least: last year the price was driven up with buying bots that shooted buy-orders with fractions of Moneros creating an illussion of increased demand). This year I am seeing a huge trading volumes and not faking bots attempting to create artificial demand.

Monero price is determined by the emotions of us, the community. It depends on how we feel about it.
Previously it depended more heavily on emission.
The most of the coins pre-tai emission is held by the community. And if we think we want to rise the price we will not sell coins cheap. If we think it is time to drop the price we unload our bags.. Simple as that.

Despite XMR might rise quite fast to quite high it doesn't make XMR a get rich quick scheme IMO. I have been waiting for getting rich with XMR soon 2 years and I think it is not getting rich quick.   You know, the past bad performance will not guarantee the future bad performance.   By bad I am refering to the fact that XMR cost the same in bitcoins on summer 2014 than today (more or less).

Personally I love them. They are working hard to feed my greed (I am a lender).  

I think there will be a coin or possibly several coins that will experience bitcoin-like meteoric rise.
Even if XMR is not the one.

You see, if you assume crypto currencies will take over the world in coming years/decades, it cannot be that the largest crypto has marketcap of only in billions of dollars. If you look at the small currencies, their marketcaps are in 10¹² rather than billions (not to mention any major currency).

Therefore if a currency starts pretty much from the scratches, it will give a huge leverage to the wealth.

Therefore, by stating "there will be no more bitcoin 2009-2013" is correct - there will be even bigger rises on the horizon (assuming once again crypto currencies will take over the trade and the current monetary system).

I guess we can nominate wpalczynski our prophet as his predictions about you whining came true.  Nice show man! I do not know what your aspirations are but I am not the one selling at these price points.

Only time will tell if my post was shit or not. You can judge it on 1st of January 2018, not before that.  

I see your point: spending 1 xmr here and there will not hurt the ecosystem.
On the other hand,  personally I would love to see 1000s upon 1000s of people owning 1000 XMR each and seeking ways to increase their balances and also spending some odd amounts in a smart things (like groceries etc) rather than people buying coins and immediately spend them leaving XMR a mere token.
If XMR gets the role of token only it creates downward pressure on the price due to the lack of propensity to hold the coin. The value of the coin is derived the willingness of hold and the greed to get more coins.

That being said, I do not see spending XMR on necessities and holding large amounts (and increasing the stake) as mutually exclusive.