The BNP Paribas Currency Bias Indicator is generated from the bank’s system of trading models and provides a ranking of the relative strength of currencies based on their current trading performance. The performance of each currency is compared to every other currency within the BNP Paribas system of models to identify currencies which may be gaining or losing relative strength, or are at an overextended position (bullish or bearish extremes). The system provides a good indicator of when currencies are set to accelerate trends, or are vulnerable to a correction (or even a change in trend). It can be deployed across multiply time scales to provide intraday automated trading signals, right through to providing a systematic portfolio hedging tool.

The American humourist Mark Twain said more than 100 years ago that “September was a bad month for the (stock) markets, as was October, November, December etc.”

Therefore, one has to ask if you ‘darling buds of M-A-Y’ saw IT coming way back when we uttered a major sigh of relief that 2009 was finally over! Did we see the Euro falling to a 4-year low @ $1.1876, the Swiss Franc once again becoming a safe haven and what about gold…$1,250+ and going higher with bond rates falling? Well, the world’s bond markets have been telling this old fundamentalist…where is Da Inflation?

In almost 40 years in the financial markets, this has been a trying year and Bill cannot see where it will all end, but he says that there have been so many fantastic opportunities in the past 18 months – Barclays Bank/Fresnillo/Lloyds Bank/Bonds/Citigroup etc. Are the charts telling us now to BUY…”Beijing Petroleum?”

All will be revealed at the summer party, at Bill’s old stomping ground…Bloomberg.

Tom has a keen interest in cycles, believing there is no dualism between financial markets and natural cycles. He will talk about a variety of approaches to cycles in order to determine timing and price.

Attendees will have to have an open mind as he will challenge the concept of measuring time and look at the different cultural attempts to track time from the Mayan calendar to the Chinese/Japanese techniques, even heliotaraxy (effect of solar activity on the biosphere). Planetary alignments and well known cycles such as Kondratieff and Martin Armstrong’s work will also be discussed. The conclusions will allude to recent events and coming events that can be forecasted by using a cycles approach in line with technical chart signals. Tom will show how to exploit these observations and incorporate them into a strategy for making profits in the future.

Charlie last spoke to the STA 2007 about relative strength. At that time, his equity fund had returned 30% in 2007, which was 20% ahead of the market with lower volatility. In 2008, however, the reverse occurred and momentum strategies had their worst year in a generation. Charlie will discuss his experiences; his past successes and failures, with the intent to help the audience better understand the strengths and weaknesses of technical analysis. He will also explain his “five styles” investment process whereby each style requires an entirely different investment approach. Whilst two styles embrace technicals, one is agnostic and the other two shun it.

David will cover the ground-breaking new area of technical analysis, known as Cloud Charts or Ichimoku in Japan. He will present many new ideas that have underpinned his recent book on the subject. He will look at combining Cloud Charts with other technical analysis techniques, multi-time frame analysis, Japanese pattern techniques, back-testing and market breadth.

In his talk Malcolm will discuss some of the technical analysis concepts which have been profitable for him, some of the ones which haven’t (and why that is), which ones seem to have captured the imagination of the general public, and some of the things which make a real difference such as position sizing and belief systems.

Having been a technical analyst since 1963, Brian brings the benefit of perspective to his analysis of the markets. He worked at Investors Overseas Services and then at NM Rothschild & Sons. He was the first fund manager in the UK to manage large funds using only technical analysis.

For six successive years, institutional investors voted him the best technical analyst in the City. He also has an outstanding FX forecasting record.

In the 1980s he was a member of the Visiting Faculty of International Management Institute (Geneva), the oldestestablished business school in Europe. He has taught technical analysis at the Ministry of Finance in Singapore.

His book “Marber on Markets” was published in the UK in 2007, in India in 2008, and is due to be published, in translation, in China.

Brian can’t share all of his 54 years experience with you in 45 minutes but he will give it a good shot.

Dr Osler’s early research focused on technical trading, which has long been standard operating procedure for most currency traders. Her research on the head-andshoulders pattern, one of the first rigorous tests of a visual chart pattern, showed that trading on this pattern is profitable in two of the major currencies, dollar-yen and dollar-DEM. She also showed that support and resistance levels from professional technical analysts have significant predictive power for major exchange rates. Additional research identifies order clustering as a potential source of the predictive power of these technical levels.

Dr Osler will be talking about some of her earlier as well as more recent research related to technical analysis and will explain her findings.

Bill started investing in 1970. He retired from legal practice in 1999, and has been trading ever since. In 2001 he became technical editor of Chart Insight published by Hemscott, and in 2004 started his own website Chart-Guide.com, now part of Rivington Street Holdings plc, specializing in Elliott wave index trading.

Bill trades mainly the DJIA and FTSE 100, with a background interest in cable, gold and crude oil. Since 2002 the waves in the markets have behaved very differently from how they did in the 1930’s when Elliott discovered the principle. The 1930’s was an era of much greater social conformity than today, economic activity was depressed, and liquidity in markets was very low. This resulted in much more cohesive and clear wave structures in financial markets than today, when unprecedented liquidity and computerized trading has lead to more distortion and ambiguity. This has lead Bill to incorporate Gann fractions as well as Fibonacci into his Elliott wave analysis which gives useful additional guidance when wave counts are unclear, as they are now, rather more frequently.

Ichimoku Kinko Hyo is called the at-a-glance chart. This study does indeed give a full picture at a glance, also by resonating with concepts found in other studies. After a quick look at interpretation, the role of the cloud will be dissected in detail. Links and confirmations to moving averages, Stochastics, MACD, DMI and Elliott will also be shown.

Bill will draw on his vast market and life experience to explain how foreign exchange markets provide the ideal platform for investors to participate in the financial markets with 100s of FX pairs available to trade 24-7 in all parts of the world and not feel constrained by having to trade instruments which are opaque. His customer base feels that they are trading on a level playing field and can make decisions based on fundamental and technical analysis and their local knowledge.

Bill will share some insights into his long and colourful career as a trader, broker and market journalist and explain his views on the US dollar.

Thierry will be explaining how he successfully forecasts the FTSE 100 with e-yield indicators. These are the Bullish Trend Indicator (BTI), 13-day BTI and Top 20 Differential. His approach is based on combining Elliott wave theory with his own indicators. He will explain how these indicators work and how they can be integrated in a simple strategy to produce an accurate forecast. Elliott wave theory on its own can be confusing and these indicators have been developed to confirm the position of the Elliott wave count. Thierry will demonstrate how the BTI can help identify Elliott wave patterns and how to use the 13-day BTI and Top 20 Differential as timing indicators. He will show how these two indicators have a good track record at finding market highs and lows.