Merry Christmas!

Being an evil Mole has its responsibilities – one of is a strict adherence to being politically incorrect and thus to insist on wishing everyone unfortunate enough to know me personally a Very Merry Christmas. Let me take this opportunity to extend the very same to all my intrepid stainless steel rats. But unlike all those other schmucks who insist on sending you those sanctimonious holiday wishes printed on glossy recycled cardboard toilet paper I for one don’t show up empty handed:

That’s right, this is Mole’s Christmas present for all Evil Speculator addicts and it’s called Rammstein (you know it was coming). It’s a little token of appreciation that will be available free for a few months to anyone who ever signed up as a member in the past. More about this below.

The performance data you see above has been back tested and then forward tested for about a month now – admittedly, that’s not too long. But I have to say that Rammstein kept on printing coin through the most tiresome and annoying tape I had the displeasure of enduring – the past two months, which were outright nasty even by 2009 standards. Will it continue to produce like this? Probably not – but what I know right now is that it performs very well in insidious sideways and gapping tape – which is surprising really.

So, the right mindset to look at Rammstein is ‘insurance for 2010’. Why? Because if we actually ever get to Primary wave {3} I believe that Rammstein will start having trouble and that evil.rat and resident.evil will spike up and run off into the sunset. Why do I believe that? Glad you asked. Because Rammstein started to work very well right in June – before that it was running sideways more or less with a slight trend up. Evil.rat and resident.evil both performed magnificently right until June and then started to slowly drift down – not horribly so, but both had difficulties in the last few months. There appears to be a distinct inverse correlation in respect to the timing.

So what happened around June – you might ask? I looked around and finally the scales dropped off my eyes as I realized what might be happening here. Mr. VIX dropped below the 30 mark around that time frame – that’s what. So, my current take is that Rammstein works well in nasty Fed manipulated tape and that evil.rat and resident.evil will make a Rocky Balboa style come back should we dip into Primary {3}.

The approach of giving it away for few months is based on lessons learned with evil.rat and resident.evil. Quite frankly, I want you guys to bank some coin before you start paying for the service. If it then starts failing us at least you’ve made some money beforehand and perhaps it’ll also give you the mental fortitude to sit out a bad month or so, should thathappen. Rammstein also needs to prove itself to you guys, obviously curve fitting could deceive us here, although the last five weeks give me hope that this is not the case.

If you start banking coin with Rammstein in the interim and you feel like giving something back you can always sign up for a month or two of Zero goodness – after all it’s only 49 bucks. Should Rammstein perform well into March then I would probably consider making it subscription only but at that point I think nobody would complain about having to pay up. Well, at least most of you – someone always complains for sure 😉

So, that’s it – if you are interested in receiving the signal then you can sign up right now on your membership page. If you ever signed up as a subscriber in the past just log into your membership page and then select Rammstein from the the drop down on the right side of the page:

That’s it – the membership is free but won’t extend automatically, so in a month from now you’ll have to do the same thing again.

A few pointers:

• There will be no support during the free period – nada, nichts, niente, zilch, none. However, the alerts will be very similar to what you’ve experienced with evil.rat and resident.evil, so if you were ever a sub here you know the drill.
• Alerts will be email only and SMS alerts through my gateway will not be enabled (obviously). But you can of course receive SMS alerts through the gmail filter as explained on the evil.rat and resident.evil pages.
• There will be a Rammstein page that will be updated frequently – but probably not before the middle of January.
• The stop is currently around 40 ticks, but that might change once I start optimizing it a little more. There is actually a trailing stop that moves after a trade pushes a few ticks into the green. I still have to add the notifications for that.
• There is no ‘target’ – the strategy stays in a trade until it either gets stopped out, runs into an inverse signal, or the day ends.
• Yes, there are long and short trades.
• The performance data shown above is based on one single contract and no pyramiding. I leave all that fancy stuff up to you.
• The signal will be live starting next Monday – if you sign up before that you will start receiving email alerts, assuming the strategy triggers. Of course you can subscribe anytime whenever you feel like.
• Rammstein exits at the end of the day, just like any other strategy I have developed. No holding of overnight positions – I don’t enjoy playing Russian roulette (however, I do enjoy strip poker with hot Russian ladies – you know where to find me).

That’s all I can think of right now. I propose you sign up and then just watch the signal for a while. Once you think that you developed a good feel for it – or perhaps you paper traded it for a bit – then put a small amount of real coin on it and see what happens. Again, I suggest you play it safe and use this as insurance against possibly more nasty sideways tape that might extend into next year.

As you know – I don’t have a crystal ball and as traders we have no control over how much money we can make on a given day. The tape either moves in favor of our trading strategies or it doesn’t. But what we can control is risk and thus the amount of money we lose. And that’s where the rubber meets the road in that it is the difference between hobby traders and the pros. For the experienced trader learns that nobody knows the future and that the game is all about edge, probability, money management, and most of all controlling your risk exposure.

I hope that Rammstein will help you assess you risk in that it might allow you to offset losses in non-bearish and non-bullish tape – meaning, the same kind of crap we’ve seen in the past few months. That is daytime sideways action preceded by nasty overnight directional surprises. Not the tape most retail traders can make money in – but perhaps Rammstein will give us an edge in such a climate.

Actually I hope that Rammstein will fail in the end as this will most likely mean that Primary {3} is upon us and we get long drops to the downside. If that happens we’ll know soon enough – but if the Feds manage to stretch this thing out for another few months or perhaps even throughout 2010 then at least we might have something to work with. I for one like to be prepared – that’s why I’m still standing today.

Wishing you a very merry Christmas and if you don’t hear from me next week – a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year. I hope 2010 will be a good one for all of us and I am looking forward to seeing you all again here in early January. In the meantime I’ll be a bit quiet here but gmak and Michael might put up a post here and there.

And finally a very politically correct Happy Holidays to all hedonists, infidels,  atheists, and misfits out there 😉

Cheers,

Mole