Editor’s note: Eoin Treacy is s a global strategist at Fullermoney.com. He provided details on a strategy that could help investors beat their benchmark at the MTA Annual Symposium in March. The complete presentation is available at the MTA’s Knowledge Base, the web’s free repository for everything related to technical analysis. Many investment managers and individual investors set a relatively simple goal for themselves. They want to beat the benchmark. Eoin Treacy explained the problem with the goal and then explained how it can be done at the beginning of his presentation. To begin with, beating the benchmark is hard. It can be done, but the only way it can be done is to try something different. Once again, this goal sounds deceptively simple. There are many ways for an investment manager to do something different. The biggest problem here, as many investment managers have learned, is that doing something different can get you

Sam Hale, CMT, passed away on August 4, 2015 at the age of 78. Sam spent many years as the Senior Technical Analyst – Futures and Options Divisions at A. G. Edwards before retiring in 2002. Prior to that, Sam enjoyed a successful, although brief, career in broadcasting in Atlanta, Chicago and New York, Sam shifted from the markets’ being his avocation into his full time career in 1966. His Wall Street career included seven years at Dean Witter before forming his own NASD research boutique. After three years as president of this firm, he became a member of the CBOE and a registered Market Maker in IBM, EK, and GM. While on the floor he remained a market timing consultant to other market makers, as well as to a member firm. He was recruited by A. G. Edwards & Sons, Inc. in 1984 where, as the senior technical analyst for the

On August 11, 2015, the Board of Directors of the Market Technicians Association (MTA) suspended the MTA membership of Vishal B. Malkan, including the right to use the Chartered Market Technician (CMT) designation, for a period of 36 months. The suspension results from a determination that Mr. Malkan violated Ethical Standard 1 of the MTA’s Code of Ethics, which requires all members to maintain at all times the highest standards of professional integrity.  Mr. Malkan failed to disclose in his Personal Conduct Statement (PCS) that he had been the subject of a customer complaint. The MTA suspension was imposed for failing to disclose this action for several years.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the August 27 issue of Bloomberg Brief: Technical Strategies. Below is an extract of that article. Charts have been the basis of technical analysis since Charles Dow learned how to draw point and figure charts from other traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Despite the proliferation of indicators, charts are still the basis of technical analysis. In a recent Bloomberg Brief: Technical Strategies, Dean Rogers, Senior Analyst at Kase & Co., presented a complete trading strategy for natural gas. Blue trend lines highlight a bearish flag pattern. This indicates traders should consider short positions. However, a move above $2.75, based on a confluence of several important retracement and extension levels, would indicate potential upside in natural gas. Indicating a reversal level is an important part of any analysis. Simple trendline analysis can offer valuable trading insights. From the group of charts below, it’s possible

Editor’s note: sentiment analysis has long been a part of technical analysis. In the past, sentiment was often measured in surveys and a significant lag existed between the time questions were answered and results were distributed. Real-time communications lessen that time lag and create new opportunities for measuring sentiment. Rather than measuring just attitudes towards the market, it’s now possible to quantify the tone of headlines related to economic news. That application is the topic of this paper which was originally published by TrendPointers and is reprinted here with permission. Executive Summary: The new methodology of MacroSentiment Analytics© (MSA) provides an application of causal or anticipatory MacroSentiment Analytics that are shown to significantly outperform the benchmark S&P 500 over a recent nearly five-year period. The complex-text analytics process, applied to the 24/7 flow of an adaptive lexicon of financialrelevant information, is a new design to extract the net meaning of content

Abstract: The report discusses the merits of the entitling High Frequency Trading and its rapid growth as the future of computerized trading. A lack of evidence and analysis in the recent literature endows most of the contemporary discussion as only that of an interim typology and in turn grants an element of caution and vigilance in the use of HFT, in the light of the May 6th 2010 flash crash. The effort to introduce controls has been gradually surging in the recent years, through the likes of MiFID I and MiFID II by the European Union. Then, the aim of this paper is to provide an overview of recent research on the effects of HFT on market quality and its robustness. The objective is to evaluate recent literature and assess main theoretical frameworks and empirical findings. Understanding the implications of HFT on market quality could potentially offer a better understanding