Will try to put together some benchmarks for the cooler sketches & summary stats. Doing mutual information across two millisecond streams could be pretty convincing!
When people use derivatives to hedge their exposure to "bad things happening" and the market is not very liquid (i.e. BTC), arbitrage opportunities can persist. For example, if there is no buyer at an out-of-the-money option strike price I know is overpriced, then the market cannot correct itself even though I am "right." When these mis-pricings stick around for a while, the eventual corrections are often much more extreme. Derivatives reduce overall volatility when the spot market is mature and liquid, which is a far cry from MtGox right now.
Logistic regression and other parametric, non-regularized linear learners tend to do poorly with NLP forecasting -type modeling. (They usually overfit.)
Out-of-sample backtest or it didn't happen. Out of a bunch of random search queries, chances are several of them will be "predictive" of futures moves in an index. Big whoop.