Welcome Back To The Future

Welcome back to Evil Speculator! As you can tell the place has undergone a bit of an overhaul over the past two weeks. Unfortunately I am only about half way done as we’re still missing quite a few links and some page content which I’ll have to fill in over the coming days. The process of beating our new site theme into submission took me longer than anticipated. I usually expect delays but I was forced to burn many frustrating hours figuring out various problems on my own as tech support staff was still on holiday. In addition I had underestimated how much legwork would be required to update older posts to fit the new format. Anyway, we’re getting there but I ask you all to be patient over the coming week or two while things gradually are put together.

It has always been my policy to resist redesigns just for the sake of novelty. Many once great sites learned that the hard way when they wound up innovating themselves out of business. One of the most salient examples I personally recall is digg.com, which in 2010 lost more than a quarter of its core audience due to a bad site redesign. Which was only the overture into a slow but steady slide into Internet oblivion.

Suffice to say that I was very determined to not make that mistake and the core sections are pretty much where you regular readers would expect them. So if you loved the old version of Evil Speculator then chances are you will feel right at home in the new theme as well. The basic layout has remained the same but the menus and various sections are now much more accessible and will permit new visitors to navigate the site more intuitively. The biggest issue I had with the old site design was that it was very effective at hiding a ton of educational content and various tools I had produced over the years. Everything had pretty much grown organically and new readers kept repeating the same basic questions that we had already covered in detail in literally hundreds of educational posts.

One of the most salient changes you will appreciate are the new menus. For the record they are not done just yet as I’m still ready to reorganize various site categories. But you’ll surely appreciate the drop downs that allow you to quickly delve deeper into various educational sub categories of the site. In general educational content has been brought to the forefront as this is really considered marketing 101. I can only imagine how many people may have visited here over the past few years and soon left thereafter without realizing how much quality content was lurking there under the surface.

The second biggest aspect of the site redesign was the realization that it was almost impossible for new visitors to figure out the range of services offered here. Clearly that had to be communicated better and as a result you now see a new section on the front page which features three big buttons:

• E-Mini Swing Trading
• Discretionary trading
• System Trading

That is basically the type of services we offer here at Evil Speculator. The Zero subscription is much appreciated by swing traders and scalpers and there is a pretty large market of traders that is probably oblivious to its advantages. The discretionary trading section section isn’t done yet – this is basically our Gold subscription and I still need to redesign some of that content to better communicate what we do here on a daily basis. Finally on the system trading front we have Scalpius and Thor, allowing traders to follow trading signals or join the LAMM signal service we are running in collaboration with Vankar. That section also still needs to be redesigned and I plan to get it done by the end of this week.

All this has been designed in preparation of various affiliate partnerships I plan to tie over the course of this year. If you Google around various trading related keywords you will find that Evil Speculator is curiously absent out there, bordering Internet invisibility. This is mainly my fault for not having done a better job at marketing and neglecting even basic sales efforts over the past few years. The last PR I found was from 2011 and ever since we haven’t been mentioned at all out there. This clearly has to change as social media and other community trading efforts have been draining traffic from regular trading blogs and traditional outlets. What has saved Evil Speculator this far was an unusually high retention rate but this is not something we can afford to keep relying on. So if you’re involved in the content syndication and affiliate marketing area or know someone who is then please pass them my information.

On the trading front you will see that I have added a new sidebar on the right of our posts (not the front page) which now features a ‘current campaigns’ widget. The charts you see in there are currently mockups but will soon be replaced by live campaigns which get updated every 5 minutes. Which will enable you to keep track of all open campaigns almost in real time. Over the coming months I will also add Google spreadsheet logging to those so that we can track the performance of discretionary trading this way. I think this will be awesome and really help everyone to keep in sync with all open campaigns.

Clearly there’s a lot more and I won’t bore you with all the details. The theme has been designed to support various handheld devices and you shouldn’t have any trouble accessing it from your iPad or mobile phone. The menu bar is actually two menus – the blue/gray one leading to various site categories and the text menus under the word ‘menu’ lead to stuff we regularly need to get access to. Which I also still need to flesh out but it’s the one you subs will appreciate the most when accessing your subscription services, tutorials, and pertinent content.

In terms of advertising I’m on the fence. The theme supports ad banners all over the place but I don’t want to overload the site with a ton of crap either. So once the new site has been completed I plan to slowly introduce a few banners here and there. Of course subscribers should not see any of those, only the leeches get to suffer. Anyway, I would of course appreciate any and all input, criticism, suggestions, praise – bring it on!

Alright, on to business. Since it’s the first trading session of the year I feel generous and will make this a freebie for all.

On the equities side we are seeing further weakness in the futures as over here in Europe the DAX is down over 4% today. The S&P E-Mini is not anywhere near support and I would caution against getting involved right now. Probably best to wait an hour or two into the open at minimum for things to get settled a little after the long holiday.

The NQ however is already sitting on daily and weekly support right now. It’s actually quite critical that it holds here as there’s nothing but air below until about 4200. I’ve marked the chart where I see context so please keep an eye on that.

Alright, as we’re at the cusp of a new trading year let’s cover some of basic food groups, starting with the futures. Crude is just looking sad here and I fail to see anything positive or any context that would justify taking entries. For now I would stay away.

Gold is not exactly a picture of joy either. With all that talk of doom and gloom one would expect to see a bit more bullishness but it seems the gold bugs will continue the slow churn to the downside. Note the descending channel on the weekly panel – this may be good for swing trading entries. However I would always look for context on the hourly and daily panels.

Bonds are super interesting here as I’m sure is rather apparent by the trend lines I have painted on both the daily and weekly charts. Again, no entries here just yet but things are coiling up and this is one of the symbols to follow in 2016. I expect big moves here.

Forex – the AUD/USD is looking very interesting as the daily is producing a nice pennant of sort. A long entry here may be in the cards near 0.71 but again I need to see hourly context first.

The USD/JPY is basically locked in a sideways range from hell on the weekly panel, however I do see nice activity on the daily panel, assuming you tolerate a bit of volatility. High intra-day volatility combined with a sideways range on the weekly however tells me that a breach of one of the external thresholds is likely to turn into a squeeze. So let’s keep an eye on this one this year as well.

Last but not least the EUR/USD, my old nemesis (noobs: I earn in Dollars but spent in Euros). Well, it’s coiling up on the daily and I expect a move here shortly. On the weekly panel we seem to be locked in a range between roughly 1.05 and 1.15. I don’t see that changing in the near future given the dynamics between the ECB’s and the Fed’s respective activities. Again, this one should be good for trading the swings this year and I expect us to be busy doing just that.