Surfhero:
I bought a BFL little single once for ~$1,200. If I had bought XBT at the time, I would have had around 15.
Once I received the miner, I was lucky to get 1 XBT out of it before I sold it for $700 over what I paid - right after BFL sent me an email saying they had shipped all back orders and were shipping from stock.
Some sucker was desperate to get in the game and was poorly informed.
Take heed: if you believe in cryptocurrency as our future, buy a little at a time (Coinbase lets you buy in fractions of a Bitcoin) according to what you can handle, store it in a secure offline wallet (e.g., electrum --- and make many copies both on CD and USB).
DO NOT SELL, DO NOT SPECULATE! Every asshole out there is trying to do that and there are plenty of bigger fish in the sea that will eat your lunch ----- and your profit!
BUY AND HOLD! It is the best prospect to make a profit, now and in the next couple of years. Buy a little every week, if you can. AND HOLD ONTO IT.
Don't go thinking you can predict the market. Don't try and get in the mining game because you'll spend more cash than the Bitcoin you'll get out of it just trying to play that game. It just makes more sense to buy than invest in hashing power.
(That said, I make plenty day trading a small portion of my holdings....but I've been in the game a lot longer than you, and it's no better than Craps.)
If you want to speculate, buy a bunch of an altcoin you think will go somewhere. Buy and hold LTC cause it's up there in price now, but plenty of other coins (DigitalCoin, SecureCoin, etc.) are cheap enough that you can drop $10 and get a bunch of them to see where they take you! (If you end up at a significant profit, you can always trade up to BTC.
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Seriously: BUY AND HOLD. Forget the rollercoaster of the ups and downs. Does not matter. BITCOIN TO THE MOON!!!!! (and it'll make you a millionaire if you just buy and hold.)