STA Blog

One of the many advantages of being a member of the Society of Technical Analysts (STA) is that, because we’re affiliated with the International Federation of Technical Analysts (IFTA), we can join their online presentations. I was advised by email that IFTA was holding one of these events on the 25th May at a very reasonable time for me. Their introduction to the speaker is reprinted below.

Annual seasonality can be a valuable tool for improving your investing results. Recurring events such as market reports or futures contract expirations influence the prices of indices and individual stocks. In his presentation, Dimitri Speck will show that such patterns exist in many instruments and how you can implement them in your existing trading approaches.

Dimitri Speck is a book author, financial analyst, and trading systems developer. His seasonal investment strategy and his commodity strategy have won international awards. Speck is the editor of the website seasonax.com where interested investors can perform seasonal studies with more than 20,000 instruments.

His professional profile claims he’s a specialist in pattern recognition; this lies at the heart of Seasonax, which he founded in 2014; he also co-founded Seasonax Capital in 2018 which is aimed at institutional investors and high net worth individuals. He’s currently offering a 30% discount on his system by using the code ‘ifta30’.
What his method boils down to is looking at price data for segments of the annual calendar, over a period of many years. He then plots trends where prices are more likely to rise, fall or move sideways in any one month or series of months; ‘’I deal with probabilities’’. He adds: ‘’seasonal trends are not stable over centuries’’ and finds that ‘’ten years [of data] is enough. Looking at thirty years plus is too much history.’’
His presentation is slick and fast-paced, with loads of very clear slides covering a myriad of markets, including Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). He can’t tell us where he gets his data from, but affirms it is not Bloomberg or Refinitiv as these are too expensive. He’s an endearing and cheerful speaker – with a heavy German accent. When he started talking about the beer market, well, this was a new one on me. I had to laugh at my mistake because what he meant was a ‘bear’ market!