To coincide with St Patrick’s Day last week Scientific American posted on social media a short video to help you spot a four-leaf clover. Presented by a self-confessed egg-head, the focus is on pattern recognition and how science can help […]

Looking at the beautiful photos taken by British astronaut Tim Peake from the International Space Station reminded me of how important distance and familiarity are to technical analysis. When charting a new market or instrument I always insist on starting […]

Introduced by Guido Riolo, Bloomberg’s Head of Charting, as ‘a genius of the world of finance’ whose Sequential®, Combo®, and TD Lines® the terminal supplies, audience expectations were running high at the STA’s monthly meeting. A heavyweight in the world […]

Organised by Tom Hicks MENG MSTA MSCI, and more importantly the STA’s Head of Programmes, for many members it was an opportunity to scale new heights – if you could manage the rather complicated lifts to the 17th floor, that […]

An idea suggested by STA members, and one I wholeheartedly support, is not a ‘Book Club’ as such (way too bourgeois) but a forum to showcase and discuss books that are either new, useful, or beautiful (to paraphrase William Morris); […]

This month’s speaker, Riccardo Ronco of institutional equity brokerage Aviate Global, dashed in on a cold London evening looking just as dapper as you’d expect of an Italian. Claiming his compatriots were no good at cracking jokes to break the […]

Rather than the usual monthly format of guest speaker presentation followed by a handful of questions, January’s get together encourages audience participation and debate between the speakers themselves. The STA was lucky to have a panel of three very different […]

If, like me, you have spent way too many hours, days, and years studying charts – and more often than not staring blankly at computer screens – it’s nice to know some things only have to be done very occasionally; […]

These were the themes of Minouche Shafik, Deputy Governor markets and banking at the Bank of England, who chose the Institute of Directors’ grand premises on Pall Mall as the venue for her first major monetary policy speech. With a […]

DEFINITION: A characteristic of a time series in which the data experiences regular and predictable changes which recur every calendar year. Any predictable change or pattern in a time series that recurs or repeats over a one-year period can be […]

For those of you who could not make it to the STA Annual Dinner yesterday, we offer a glimpse into what was another successful and enjoyable evening. Pre-dinner drinks in the so-called smoking room (which is only permitted on the […]

Yesterday something completely different happened at the regular STA monthly meeting: a talk without charts! Well, just one but none of us managed to guess what it was: blood sugar levels of an Israeli parole board, so not an entirely […]

They’re easy to spot, but do we really know what they mean? October saw strong rallies in many equity indices and it got me thinking. First reactions are shock and awe, glee too, but digging a little deeper are the […]

We all know that bear markets work differently to bull ones, whether you look at it from an Elliott Wave perspective (five phases on the way up but only three on the decline), patterns (blow-off tops versus rounded bottoms), and […]

Technical analysis is truly international, not just because it has practitioners spread across the globe but because it is a common language we can all understand and relate to. It is another lingua franca, not like Esperanto but like maths, […]

The STA’s October monthly meeting was a real knock-out – but then what else would one expect from Jeremy? Timed to coincide with the release of his second book – 21st Century Point and Figure (our library has a copy) […]

Primary school first introduced us to basic charts, cutting up a pie into equal-sized portions to feed all those around the table, plotting the height of class members as a histogram, or a line linking the number of hours’ worth […]

The S&P 500 index this year had held in the tiniest range in decades – 3.5 per cent either side of its opening level – then in August the beast turned nasty. Taking so many by surprise the Vix index, […]

The quickest and easiest way to establish a trend is by drawing a trend line, yet it is unbelievable and frightening how often these are done incorrectly. At the risk of being pedantic and accused of treating readers condescendingly, we […]

In the olden days charts were kept by hand. Graph paper was usually white, though sometimes pale green was preferred as it is said to be easier on the eye. Sharpened pencils at the ready the working day started and […]