STA Blog

Tuesday the 13th of September 2022 Steve O’Hare had been booked to present a webinar for STA members on his current favourite subject – multi-language research and trade ideas using technical analysis. Beforehand I looked him up on LinkedIn which tells me he’s been working at PIA-First for the last 10 years, is currently COO at Signal Centre, and then he explained that a firm called Acuity bought them out. His opening slide credited Spaniards Ariel Duarte and Ines Clemente, the data scientists behind the new operation.

Steve’s background is very much open outcry trading, and trading his personal account, inspired originally by the film Trading Places with Eddie Murphy (an oldie but a goldie and I urge you to watch). Using point and figure charts and pivot points, he found that the noise emanating from the pits was one of the most reliable indicators of sentiment. Having worked in large bank dealing rooms I can attest that the noise coming from desperate dealers and their clients does give one an edge.

He then explained how the firm is currently estimating sentiment data embedded in news stories using artificial intelligence (AI). The results are published, using red and green for bearish and bullish news, as dials on a slick dashboard – rather like Refinitiv (Reuters) displays. AI certainly speeds this up as I know because years ago I had the chance to do this laborious process manually.

He went on to explain some of the advantages of their system with slides of the correlations and returns on 5 major markets. They aim to publish an Acuity Opportunity Score which combines momentum (based on exponential moving averages), news, sentiment and volatility. Here Steve provides the trading ideas while IT cover news sentiment. He admits: ‘’there’s a lot more work to do’’.