STA Blog

Well, we’ll have to give it to him, he’s done 53 years as a professional technical analyst/strategist, despite a BA in economics from Nottingham University. His first City job was at stockbrokers Phillips and Drew – one of the many names I remember from long ago – which produced, in Robin’s opinion, some of ‘’probably the best fundamental analysis in London.’’ Well, I bet that’s not what you expected! Exempted from 9 of the 13 actuarial exams required, he tidied up the situation ASAP.

An institutional equities salesman for many years, his first retirement, from HSBC, was 18 years ago. He then was snapped up by Rathbones, followed by Cazenove, which kept him busy, but allowing him to enjoy his passion for sailing, over the next 11 years.

Robin Griffiths

He’s currently Editor of a monthly subscription newsletter called Dynamic Investment Trends Alert, where his long-time, right-hand-man, Rashpal Sohan is the Managing Editor. They’re linked in with Southbank Investment Research who manage marketing and so forth, but they remain otherwise independent – hence their logo on his introductory slide.

From here he moves on to current market analysis with an outline of how his asset-picking system is constructed. ‘’The price of government bonds now is delusional’’ he starts, but explains that this is the ‘’new normal’’ as the Fed&Co do more and more QE – and even NOT QE. He continues to favour Asia and its countries with massive populations, China and especially India. He’s also keen on gold.

Colour-coded, he separates global invest choices into quintiles, trying to keep to the top two where ideally, bullish momentum should be running at half a per cent per week. Understandably he warns against passive investing, quite correctly warning that ‘’some ETFs don’t actually do what they say on the tin’’ – and always slip against you.

While his current methodology has been back-tested to 1998, it remains basically a ‘black box’ controlled by Rashpal.