This week a familiar face at STA monthly meetings, Ron William, sent me a piece he had co-authored with Robin Griffiths FSTA.  I’m sure they’ll be at our Christmas party on Tuesday 12th December so, if you have any questions […]

Free newspaper City AM is my morning tube-ride read of choice.  Topical, relevant, and mercifully concise I can usually get through it by my destination.  On the 31st October, they ran an interesting article called: ‘Why cutting through noise is […]

New rules as to how investment research is distributed and gets paid for come into force on the 3rd of January 2018.  They’re called MiFID II because this is the second version of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive.  Dreamt […]

The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, as Britain’s Central Bank is fondly known, was founded in 1694 but only moved to its current premises in 1734.  Public subscription had raised £1.2 million and it was open for business as the […]

Context is the critical element in your search for opportunities, not a price and direction forecast. Enthusiasm, what Greenspan called back in the 90’s “irrational exuberance” is the hallmark to a late stage of a Great Bull market, like it […]

Some months ago I was invited to speak at an investors’ conference in Mayfair.  Several familiar faces were there but I was interested in listening to a new one, so I arrived extra-early to hear her talk.  It was not […]

Yesterday, the 15th October 2017, the 30th IFTA annual conference wrapped up in Milan and, based on posts and comments in social media, delegates and speakers judged it a success.  In case you didn’t get to go, here is a […]

Tuesday the 10th October 2017 the STA invited Dr Dmytro Bondar to speak at its members’ monthly meeting.  His topic: detecting market cycles using ILSA – the spectral analysis of the title.  His logic was sound and his mathematics rigorous, […]

This is the shortened link to the interview with Raoul Pal on Jesse Felder’s series of Superinvestors and the Art of Worldly Wisdom.  It’s a podcast recorded about two months ago and rated highly by Charles Newsome, deputy chairman of […]

As usual the STA Annual Dinner was timed to coincide with the Liberal Party’s annual conference, this year in sunny Bournemouth – as billed on their web site.  This means that we had the whole of their gorgeous club pretty […]

I don’t know about you but my email use is fairly chaotic.  Not only do I have two Gmail accounts – I could of course have more but I struggle as it is – but as well as my mobile […]

A familiar face at STA monthly meetings, on Tuesday 12th September (the first chance members had to catch up after the summer holiday) it was Trevor Neil’s turn to stand at the podium.  Bravely admitting to 40 years’ experience trading […]

Considering how long I’ve been working in financial services, you’d think that one way or another I will have, at some point, covered most internationally traded commodities, stocks, bonds and derivatives.  Yet every now and then something or someone alerts […]

Michael Peel, writing in the Financial Times this month, certainly got my taste buds going, telling us about the growing foodie movement spreading through this long isolated country following the end of military rule in 2011.  A firm breakfast favourite […]

The Vix index, originally developed by Menachem Brenner and Dan Galai in 1986, was launched as a futures contract in 2004 on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (then options on this future introduced in 2006).  It followed the stock market […]

Since the great financial crisis started a decade ago the Bank of England has slashed its key Bank Rate to a record low 25 basis points.  To keep people on their toes all along they have been promising that any […]

As technical analysts we are used to working with ratios.  Perhaps the most famous are the ones devised by Fibonacci, the Italian mathematician called Leonardo Pisano who was born about 1170.  Picking up the Hindu-Arabic numeral system by living in […]

Recent comments, comings, and goings at the US White House have been really too extraordinary for words.  Vowing to clean up the Washington ‘swamp’, Donald Trump has collected a coterie of unusual candidates in his inner circle.  So rather than […]

Donald Trump won the US Presidential election promising to ‘make America great again’.  Markets and investors took him at his word, hoovering up the US dollar and selling the most vulnerable – the Canadian dollar and Mexican peso – hard.  […]

This Friday, the 21st July 2017, the latest issue of Investors Chronicle magazine will hit the news stands and I think will be of interest to STA members and their friends.  Part of the Financial Times stable of publications, and […]