STA Blog

I felt I had to dash and write up an excellent webinar presentation this afternoon courtesy of IFTA, introduced by Bruce Fraser and co-hosted by Ron William. Jean-Francois is CEO of Management Joint Trust SA, 1 Rue de Hesse, 1204 Geneva, a company founded by his father in 1969. Do look at their website www.mjtsa.com or contact them at jfo@mjt.ch or +41 22 328 9333 where you can request a copy of their monthly commentary.

His presentation was clear, topical, well-rehearsed and he is a confident speaker with excellent English. The methodology he uses was programmed in the early 1980s and his charts are copyright MJTSA©1985, to which clients can log in and use. Basically they involve envelopes around price action calculated with standard deviations. He hones in on and focuses on exaggerated moves, and when to expect different moves to appear; for this he uses a series of oscillators as he tries to capture intermediate tops and bottoms, or ‘’harmonic highs and lows’’ as he calls them. Confidence ratings are associated with moves inside the bands and all projections are based on end-of-day data.

Then he ploughs through, at a steady pace, looking at key markets – and related ones like spread charts which he calls ‘’analogues’’. These include Treasury yield differentials, gold and inflation expectations. He admits that to his surprise bullion is looking bullish relative to its ratio to the US stock market. Though his envelopes seem very wide to me, I do agree with the concept of comparing prices with similar and related assets,

Interestingly he uses ‘bi-monthly’ charts – the first time I have come across these. For the S&P 500 he’s looking for a new high around 5000 in Spring 2022 – a theme carried through in many other markets – though he admits this is a pretty high risk strategy. Likewise yields – where he focuses on US 3-year paper – and where like so many pundits he’s expecting the yield curve to steepen.

Conversely he expects the US dollar to weaken a little early next year, except against dollar/yen where his target is 118.00, while the Chinese Yuan should strengthen to 6.00 per greenback. When it comes to energy forecasts he sort of rambles into the realms of the tactics of the Federal Reserve and predicts a continuation of what happened in H2 2021.

STA members and those of other IFTA associated societies are urged to watch this slick and very professional presentation.