Awesome, glad to have you mining with us! I completely agree with your analysis of large multi-pool mining, which is why I started ipoMiner. If you mine the same group of large hashrate coins as everyone else.. you'll see the same not-that-great returns they do.

Now, for new coin mining, it is easy to figure out what a truly optimal strategy would be: you would sell coins that will go down in the future (more than 90% will) and hold the ones that will go up.

Since none of us are psychic, we more realistically have three imperfect options:

1) Hold everything: If you can afford it, this *may* be the winning strategy. Unfortunately, most miners can't afford to hold every coin they sell, and if they do they probably will still somehow miss time their sell on the 1:100 that does astonishingly well.

2) Sell everything: When you have mined a coin and see profit that you're happy with, sell. This strategy yields the most consistent profits, but also means you miss out on the big winners.

3) A hybrid of #1 and #2: According to your individual risk tolerance and budget, sell enough of your mined coins on a regular basis to achieve the level of consistent profit you want/need. Hold on to some portion, whether that's 5%, 15%, 50% according to your risk tolerance/budget in case a coin later goes up dramatically.

Personally, I try to separate my mining of coins from trading of them. I've personally sold several huge winners way too early (BC, VRC, CINNI, and others). If you can afford to hold every coin you mine forever to see if it turns into a big winner, that may be a reasonably sound strategy as I described in #1 above. Since most miners can't afford to hold every coin for long periods, #3 is more likely to yield the most consistent results while still leaving room for extraordinary profits on a few coins that do well long-term.