How does one increase one's odds in the speculation game?

A good place to start is by not selling lower than you bought them.

Some people on here don't seem to get that one right.

do you mean that if I bought BTC at 30$ I must keep and wait until the price raise again above 30$ ?
This may be or may be not a good strategy...
In general, trading strategies that prescribes rules of action based on the price you paid are wrong.
The price you paid is the past and you cannot change it. Trading is a bet on the future.
The only things that counts is your prediction about future prices.
The general strategy for trading is this: start with half of your capital in BTCs and half in dollars.
When you feel like it's time to bet on the increase in price of BTC, move some of the capital from dollars to BTCs, viceversa if you want to bet on the decrease of price.
The amount of capital that you move must be proportional to the estimated probabiliy of increase or decrease of the price.
If you you can't tell what the future will be, keep your capital split equally between BTCs and dollars, that is equivalent to not betting.
How you can predict that future price and the probability of it, is another story....

Yes, that is exactly what I mean. I am pretty sure that at *some* point in time, the exchange rate will come above $30 - so it would in my opinion be dumb to sell under that price if you paid $30 for your BTC and want to speculate with it.

Thanks for all the good advice, everyone. The bolded portion in particular is something I intend to implement.

Researching technical analysis made me curious, specifically about practical application of Bollinger bands. Let's look at a chart from BitCoin charts:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3652019/bands_July_14.png

Things I know about Bollinger bands:
1.) The wider apart the blue lines are, the more volatile the price of BitCoins
2.) When the brown line, (moving average), is above the uppermost blue line, the price is high.
3.) When the brown line falls below the lowermost blue line, the price is low.
4.) One good strategy is to buy when the price touches the lowermost blue band and sell when the price hits the moving average line in the middle.

My question is: what predictive indication does any of this give me about how the prices trending right now? How can I get BitCoins Charts to zoom in and show me a narrower slice of time? Does BitCoins Charts update in real time or do I have to keep clicking the refresh button?

Thank you. All of this has been very informative.