Reporting from the lecture given by Yann Cordier on the 10th March 2015, who had kindly torn himself away from his interesting job at Axa Investment Managers in Paris, something of a ‘back to the future’ theme emerged.

The main thrust of his focus was the relative strength of different sectors of the stock market.  Not to be confused with the Relative Strength Index used by technical analysts (RSI), his technique looks at relative outperformance of one security against another one; the ratio between the two compares winners with losers.  This sort of thing has been used for a very long time by stockbrokers when comparing a share to the performance of the index it is included in.