Social media giants have been channeling their inner Wile E. Coyote over the past few days for rather obvious reasons you are most likely aware of but which clearly fall outside the context of what we do and worry about here at Evil Speculator. Again, there is a myriad of places that relish in that kind of discourse and if you feel like yelling at and insulting people you’ve never met on the Internet you’ll be much better off over there. So let’s put our respective political ideologies on ice for a moment and simply look at what’s going on from a purely strategic perspective. Or in other words – how we can we take advantage?

If there is one unrewarding duty I continue to claim my own then it is to caution you against relating your trading activities with your own personal beliefs, may they be ideological, political, spiritual, religious, or otherwise. I am not saying you should abandon them in any way. Quite on the contrary – they may be the ones that keep you sane as a human being, especially in these trying times. Bu if you hazard in participating in the big game you will have to force yourself to draw a clear line between your actions as a trader and any other pursuits or interests in life.

I promised you volatility and once again I delivered in spades. Or at least the market did. Which wasn’t really much of a prediction in that we had accumulated a mountain of evidence that suggested things may get wild in January. Now before you get ahead of yourself, sell all your BTC, and bet it all on a short positions in equities you may want to hold your horses and remind yourself that ‘volatility’ does not necessitate downside. It’s merely amplifies the risk potential, but in itself volatility is an unsigned measure and thus it’s not directional.

As an expat living abroad I command a permanent front row seat perspective on what happens with the U.S. Dollar. And it’s for no other reason than the fact that I earn in Dollars but mostly spend in Euros. Which means that the EUR/USD exchange rate in particular is something I am confronted with constantly, whether or not I actually intend to.