This year’s Annual General Meeting will be held at the British Bankers Association in London on Tuesday the 8th of December 2015. It will be followed by a monthly talk and the STA Christmas Party (members only).

The guest speaker will be Russell Napier, an independent strategist at, and co-founder of, ERIC, an online platform for the sale of high-quality individually priced investment research. He is the author of “The Solid Ground,” a global macro report originally published by CLSA and now published independently. Mr. Napier is a director of the Mid Wynd International Investment Trust and the Scottish Investment Trust. He runs a two-day course in financial history (“A Practical History of Financial Markets”) aimed at professional investors and launched a new business and financial history library, the Library of Mistakes. Mr. Napier is also the author of Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons from Wall Street’s Four Great Bottoms.

The talk will be followed by the Christmas Party.

In this presentation Steve will talk about his work with traders and fund managers and how he utilises specific tools and strategies from performance psychology, neuroscience, stress physiology, decision science and mindfulness based approaches to help them to enhance their performance, improve their decision making and maximise their returns.

Jeremy du Plessis FSTA, Updata, addressed members at the STA October meeting.

Point and Figure is just as important today as it was 150 years ago. Jeremy will discuss how it has evolved over the years without losing any of it’s unique character and how it fits into 21st Century analysis.

In his talk Julius gives a brief introduction on Relative Rotation Graphs, their background, construction and interpretation and then focuses on a number of the most frequently asked questions that he ran into after their introduction in 2011.

Philip Gray, a founder member of the STA will present Bubbles, Baths and Blood, Personal Reminisces of some Great Historical International Events at the annual STA Summer Party.

Since the 1960s cognitive psychology has demonstrated many apparently unrelated ‘heuristics’ that lead to cognitive errors. Behavioural Finance, which is the study of how these errors affect financial decisions, has developed rapidly since its start in the early 1990s, but it remains an unstructured area of research and the effects of some of the heuristics seem to contradict each other.

Dr Anderson surveys the most important heuristics with some surprising examples and relates them to how investors think. He will also cover in detail why we might expect these heuristics to weigh particularly heavily on the decisions of financial analysts and fund managers.

• We don’t think how we think we think – examples
• Information processing problems: Forecasting errors, Overconfidence, Conservatism, Sample size neglect, Representativeness, Availability
• Biased decision making: Framing, Mental Accounting, Regret Avoidance, Prospect Theory
• Experts’ decisions: Historical examples, Configural processing, Economic forecasts
• Analysts’ forecasts: Over-optimism, Herding, Career concerns
• Fund managers: Groupthink, Short-termism, Benchmarks, Career concerns

Gerry’s talk will cover the use of chart analysis in modelling long term trends in a multi-asset world, whilst working down to useful short term trading ideas.

Julien Camberlin will present new ideas about how markets behave according to Elliott Waves, Chaos Theory and Fractals. These ideas have been developed in his MFTA.

His studies explain how Fibonacci ratios are formed by strange attractors that are part of the chaos theory and that prices are not stopped by Fibonacci ratios but are rather attracted by them and vibrate in their direction, according to fractal model.

The idea that markets movements are vibrating in the direction of objectives is a real revolution in the understanding of market formation.

On his talk, Yann says “Most long-only asset managers use a fundamental approach in their process – especially in the equity world. However, that does not mean portfolio construction and market timing are not part of their plan. The way such managers use technical analysis is generally twofold: (i) upstream, to target the size of their cash pocket, leverage, or beta; and (ii) downstream, as a timing tool to enter a new position, trade around it and eventually exit.

We think a third dimension is worth emphasizing, too: sector momentum analysis based on the relative strength concept. The information such charts can bring to the portfolio manager are particularly useful if you use several methods and a multi-timeframe analysis. After showing the additional information given by relative charts, we shall compare different methods and try to determine the most relevant combination of technical indicators to carry out sector analysis. Finally, we will analyse the current shape of DJ Stoxx 600 subsectors in order to build a European equity portfolio based on a top-down approach.

In his talk, Clive will discuss the evolution of the Market Profile and particularly recent advancements that are gaining traction on the other side of the pond, specifically “Auction Market Theory”; looking at “Volume at Price” data over longer time periods to establish where “Value” is for a market, and levels of acceptance for said value.

During his talk Saeed will focus on what the ancient world can teach us about modern money markets. How can we use examples from the ancient world, philosophers and writers to better understand the markets? Just as historians such as Herodotus living in ancient Greece examined the past, can traders look to their past to learn something new? Based on the rationale that if your primary objective is purely to make money from trading quickly, you can make decisions that perversely increase the likelihood of losing; Saeed will examine how successful trading can actually be achieved as a by-product of good trading. Relating concepts from the ancient world, such as water and risk, diversified knowledge, Herodotus and historical bias to the modern world money markets, Saeed demonstrates that by focusing on goals that go beyond making money, lateral thinking, targeting risk adjusted returns, and keeping drawdowns in check, investors will indirectly make more money in the long run.

Lee believes in keeping it simple. His best trading strategies are easy to follow but can provide some fantastic trading profits.
During his presentation Goals to Gold, he’ll be talking about the similarities between professional sportsmen and professional traders and the skills set that both require.

Factor models are well-known among long-term investors who favour stock selection models. But there are some exotic factors from which shorter term traders can also benefit. This presentation will discuss the various factor modelling techniques and the more exotic factors that researchers have recently discovered.

When the Efficient Market Theory (EMT) emerged in the 1970s it horrified the fundamental fund managers, and disturbed the chartists. But the chartists should have been much more positive in their immediate reaction, since they had been saying since the nineteenth century that all the views of investors were in the share price – just what, at first glance, the EMT people were now claiming – with scientific back-up. But there was a difference. The proponents of the EMT held that the result was PERFECT pricing – 100% efficiency, for shares in large informed markets. The chartists claimed rather that the markets also reflected the emotions and foolishness of investors which could from time to time over-ride reality. David will discuss the middle ground in the EMT debate and why charting is important in the investment process.

Zaheer’s talk will focus on long-term trading, bringing an understanding of The Turtle Trading system and how it can be still applied today. He will focus on such issues as how to use only the weekly and daily charts to identify trends, managing risk, how to identify target levels once in a trade and compounding to accelerate returns.