Lee believes in keeping it simple. His best trading strategies are easy to follow but can provide some fantastic trading profits.
During his presentation Goals to Gold, he’ll be talking about the similarities between professional sportsmen and professional traders and the skills set that both require.

Factor models are well-known among long-term investors who favour stock selection models. But there are some exotic factors from which shorter term traders can also benefit. This presentation will discuss the various factor modelling techniques and the more exotic factors that researchers have recently discovered.

When the Efficient Market Theory (EMT) emerged in the 1970s it horrified the fundamental fund managers, and disturbed the chartists. But the chartists should have been much more positive in their immediate reaction, since they had been saying since the nineteenth century that all the views of investors were in the share price – just what, at first glance, the EMT people were now claiming – with scientific back-up. But there was a difference. The proponents of the EMT held that the result was PERFECT pricing – 100% efficiency, for shares in large informed markets. The chartists claimed rather that the markets also reflected the emotions and foolishness of investors which could from time to time over-ride reality. David will discuss the middle ground in the EMT debate and why charting is important in the investment process.

Zaheer’s talk will focus on long-term trading, bringing an understanding of The Turtle Trading system and how it can be still applied today. He will focus on such issues as how to use only the weekly and daily charts to identify trends, managing risk, how to identify target levels once in a trade and compounding to accelerate returns.

Diploma certificates were presented to newly qualified MSTA by STA chairman Axel Rudolph at a very well attended Summer Party held at Bloombergs offices in London. We are most grateful to Bloomberg for their generous hospitality and the very well received trading game that followed.

Four candidates gained a distinction: Craig Erlam, Joshua Mahony, Marcin Narloch and Arjan Shah.

Congratulations to them, and to all our new MSTAs.

In his talk Ghassan will focus on the fact that most hedge funds are run by “Quants” with the largest bets placed using options. The fact that market neutral strategies remain the most predominant strategies in hedge funds highlights the strong belief of “Random Walk”. Using Technical Analysis it is possible to highlight pricing anomalies especially in low delta options. Delta trading and dynamic hedging is most suited to technical analysts, yet very little is done by them. Moving price pattern recognition to a quantitative system may be the first step in the right direction, as it allows the “Quant” to relate better and understand more the technical analyst’s point of view.” In Ghassan’s opinion something needs to change dramatically in the TA approach to allow non-TA (Quants) to understand what technical analysts do.

In the talk Steve Griffiths outlined his unique “Isolation Approach” to Elliott wave analysis and showed how this resolves the problems and shortfalls of more traditional forms of Elliott wave analysis. Combined with Risk Control and Position Sizing this strategy can be applied to any liquid market, including Stocks, Forex and Futures. Steve also touched on his favourite trade that he has nicknamed the “Holy Grail” because it allows the trader to take advantage of the strongest and longest of all the Elliott Wave swings, the Wave (3).

Oliver will be discussing the properties of different measures of volatility and how these can be exploited and modified to produce innovative technical indicators and combined to form powerful strategies. One example that he will demonstrate is his own Volstall indicator, designed to anticipate reversals by identifying trend deceleration.

Technicians have a long-held advantage of being able to look beyond just one asset class with more ease than fundamental analysts do. Indeed, over the past several years, it has been essential that analysts are able to have a view on not just their own area of responsibility but on the core drivers from a range of different markets, all of which can sometimes have a direct impact on seemingly unrelated trades and recommendations. David highlights how Credit Suisse Research pulls all the different asset markets together, the approach and methodology it uses, as well as its current views.

Thierry believes that the long term trend in the stock market is driven by fundamentals but in the short term, the stock market is driven by sentiment. He will demonstrate how sentiment can be used to forecast the short term direction of the stock market. It is not clear why sentiment changes but one early clue can be found in the behaviour of investors. Sentiment will often change when prices no longer respond to the news. For example when the market fails to rally on good news or when it fails to decline on bad news. His e-Yield Sentiment Indicator (ESI) measures this.

The 2008-09 economic debacle left fundamental analysts struggling to find answers. At the same time, technical analysis flourished, as uncertain investors began to question the status quo. Fast forward five years, and the market’s recovery has emboldened the fundamentalists once again, who are back to using the same flawed logic that previously destroyed centuries-old enterprises. But that complacency is nearing an end. Employing the Elliott wave model of financial price movement and socionomic principles, analyst Brian Whitmer will clarify the market’s current juncture, identifying the key opportunities and major pitfalls facing investors over the coming year.

Richard’s talk will give an introduction to hedge ratio analysis for index options and futures with charts detailing the subsequent dynamic delta hedging and how it affects the leading benchmark indices.

Linda’s talk will explain the way she quantifies market structure and how she then uses this in her trading models. One of her favourite projects in the past 6 years was modelling instances where there was ‘persistency of trend’ or what she calls, “extended runs”. The frequency of occurrence of these trends and the consistency of the statistics behind them is surprising. Linda will review some of the more common technical conditions or patterns that lead to “extended runs”, and explain the difference in her experience, between modelling price behaviour and actually trading.

This exciting and fresh presentation will explore the true nature of financial markets and how they evolve through a stochastic, fractal process of expansion and contraction. Supported by a variety of macro to micro charts from decade long to intraday futures data.