Is it better to keep your coins on an exchange or in your local wallet

[ukscone]

I only have a few k of several alt coins and i've missed out on a couple of possibly profitable trades because of the time it''s taken to send coins to cryptsy (doge took nearly 12 hours and didn't appear for about 200+ confirms recently although a few days ago deposits were only taking 6 or 7 confirms. So i'm wondering how many coins to people keep in their exchange accounts that they consider optimum in case of loss by them vs ease of trading?

[hilariousandco]

I only have a few k of several alt coins and i've missed out on a couple of possibly profitable trades because of the time it''s taken to send coins to cryptsy (doge took nearly 12 hours and didn't appear for about 200+ confirms recently although a few days ago deposits were only taking 6 or 7 confirms. So i'm wondering how many coins to people keep in their exchange accounts that they consider optimum in case of loss by them vs ease of trading?

It's always better to keep them yourself, but this depends on your circumstances if you want to keep them at cryptsy for ease of use. If the website goes down or is hacked there's a good chance you've lost them.

[landcrab]

It's a trade off between the safety of keeping the coins in your wallet vs opportunity cost of not having them available to trade. Without taking the risk of keeping coins on an exchange you lose opportunity to make profitable trades. Depends on how much risk you are willing to take and how reliable/trustworthy you view the exchange.
If you have several thousand of various coins you could take a middle ground and keep 50% of your coins in your wallets and the other 50% on exchanges. This way you don't lose everything if bad things happen to your exchange while still allowing you to make trades.

[JerryCurlzzz]

i keep small amounts for trading on exchange, that's it

[Essex343]

if i plan on holding coins for a while, i keep them local. no reason to keep them on the exchange unless you are planning to sell in the short term.

[MissBtc]

Depending on how many Bitcoins you are holding, I would suggest to not leave too many coins in an exchange but it wouldn't hurt to have coins on hand at a trustworthy exchange so as not to miss out on profitable trades.
However, if you are planning on putting away a  large amount of Bitcoin, I think putting them in cold storage would be best.