I don't trust exchanges. I prefer to sell in cash at a Bitcoin meet up. This means I'm less susceptible to market whims. I could also simply use the bitcoins to buy things. I did at one point get a butterfly labs miner but I simply broke even on that. The only thing I wish I did was buy in more massively in the early days. I know a guy who put 5k into mining rigs. Made himself 70 btc. And then promptly sold them at $2 during the first crash. He's still kicking himself over that one.

Oh and for those of you reading this: back up your wallet.dat in an encrypted truecrypt volume with multiple cloud backups!