Jason DeSena Trennert is the Managing Partner and Chief Investment Strategist of Strategas Research Partners LLC and the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the firm’s broker-dealer subsidiary, Strategas Securities, LLC. He provided an economist’s view of the markets at the MTA Annual Symposium and that view includes a number of insights that are useful to technical analysts. The complete presentation is available at the MTA’s Knowledge Base, the web’s free repository for everything related to technical analysis. In March, Jason noted, “As the 2015 trading session grinds ahead, many investors are considering how changes in the global market environment will impact their investments and strategy. The collapse of energy prices, Greece’s impact on Euromarkets, U.S. interest rate speculation and slowing growth in China are just a few important macro trends that will impact asset allocation and alpha generation in the year ahead.” His presentation provided a top down approach to

The saga of the European Default continues with Greece playing the starring role. If this were a play, the audience would be shouting at the director “will this show ever end?” All kidding aside, the Greek debacle is no small affair and has been making consistent headlines for more than two years. In fact, Greece has one of the worst track records of any country in Europe when it comes to default. Between 1826 and 1964, Greece was in default for 90 of those 138 years, so it should come as no surprise that Greece will most likely become the first Euro member to default. In the good old days, countries defaulted first and came to an agreement with creditors later. Unfortunately, this is not the case as the European Union acts like a nurse maid trying to protect all its countries or groups from being hurt by a default. So

How would you describe your job? It’s like putting together jigsaw puzzle pieces. A lot of research and preparation for each day. It always feels like detective work to me. Markets always seem to leave “footprints” before they move, and I love to look for those signs, especially using patterns that can be early indications of a turning point and direction. What led you to look at the particular markets you specialize in? Mostly efficiency and knowing my own limitations. I have always done best with focusing on a few markets and not having a lot of open positions. For example trading an index versus individual stocks offers an opportunity to analyze one index instead of scanning through many stocks for a trading opportunity. If I am trading grains, then I will look for the clearest patterns that I use to determine which market to trade. Do you look at any fundamental or economic

Editor’s note: this article was originally published as a Chart in Focus by McClellan Financial Publications. It is reprinted here with permission. In a recent article featured in our twice monthly McClellan Market Report newsletter, we featured the chart shown this week. It was inspired by some work done recently by famed technical analyst Peter Eliades, who has been a newsletter writer for many years and is the proprietor ofwww.stockmarketcycles.com. The basic point is that a period of 150 months (12.5 years) shows up in lots of places as the time distance between several important turning points for stock prices. The price data in the chart this week is the log value of the monthly close of the DJIA. Using log scaling allows us to better see the turning points without the effect of arithmetic scaling interfering with the view. Readers should understand that this is not meant to show a 150-month cycle

Editor’s note: many members seek answers to difficult career questions. Of course there are no easy answers for anything related to jobs in the current market but the MTA would like to offer some insights into different career strategies. Please send career questions to editor@mta.org and we will work with industry experts to find answers. The MTA is a group of established professionals and professionals seeking new career opportunities. There are unlimited opportunities in the financial industry but the position of money manager or investment manager is often cited as a career objective. This job itself consists of many different opportunities. Investment managers can serve individual clients under a Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) structure. Managers might work for firms managing assets under a mutual fund or hedge fund structure. There are many other ways a member could find themselves managing money. Just as there is no single job description for an investment

Editor’s note: in recent years, technical analysis has been a popular research topic. In this paper, the authors found that technical analysis can be used to generate profits in the markets. Among the papers published recently is A New Anomaly: The Cross-Sectional Profitability of Technical Analysis by Yufeng Han, Ke Yang and Goufu Zhou. The full paper is available at SSRN or by clicking here. Abstract: In this paper, we document that an application of a moving average timing strategy of technical analysis to portfolios sorted by volatility generates investment timing portfolios that often outperform the buy-and-hold strategy substantially. For high volatility portfolios, the abnormal returns, relative to the CAPM and the Fama-French three-factor models, are of great economic significance, and are greater than those from the well known momentum strategy.  Although both the moving average timing and momentum strategies are trend-following strategies, their performances are surprisingly uncorrelated and behave differently

Relative Rotation Graphs (RRGs) can be applied in any timeframe and are a versatile trading tool. RRGs can be used to scan on a universe to show those that change quadrants, or have changed direction. The chart below shows the S&P1500 companies that crossed or are about to cross into the Leading quadrant on a weekly basis. This chart was created on Monday, June 29, after global markets fell sharply in reaction to news about Greece. The next chart shows Russell 2000 companies more than 3 standard deviations away from the benchmark using daily data. This chart demonstrates how RRGs can be combined with price-based indicators to visually present information from scans. RRGs can also be applied to other market. The last chart uses intraday, 60-minute data on Forex markets with the US Dollar as the benchmark. To learn more about RRG, you can watch the free education video at Market Analyst by