STA Blog

Stephen Hoad, founder and CEO of The Stop Hunter is based in Canterbury, Kent and rarely comes up to town. He did so for the first time in four years yesterday (14th) in order to speak at the STA’s March 2023 monthly meeting. The title of the talk, ‘Gaining an Edge in Systematic and Algorithmic Trading using Renko Charts’ wasn’t exactly snappy but the presentation was packed with valuable detail and often frank insights into his methods and mind-set.

With a long career in banking and hedge funds behind him, his maths degree comes in useful with game theory, something he enjoys – as well as golf. Also handy are his strong IT skills because he, like so many today, are working with vast data sets. His funds include equities, indices, foreign exchange, commodities, crypto and a little fixed income.

Working at a Japanese bank many moons ago, he picked up several of their technical analysis tools of which Renko is clearly his favourite. Before claiming that ’’Renko is the Japanese equivalent to point and figure [charting]’’, he checks that the STA’s guru on this subject isn’t in the room. The key with both these charting methods is to get the block/box size right. Then he also suggests taking into account the relative volatility of the instrument under scrutiny. Overlaying Ichimoku clouds onto the Renko blocks, then adding perhaps two Western oscillators, where Stochastics appears to be his favourite, he builds and back tests his models .

Working on a relatively short time frame, where long term for him is about 8 days, he has therefore shortened his time units from daily to 3-hours, hourly and 1 minute. Interestingly he uses correlation risk in order to avoid duplication in his funds, yet some of these appear to hold many currency pairs. This despite the cache of markets he covers running into the hundreds.

Showing us detailed examples of his system – which has an App alerting him to new trades – his accounting is done by automatic emails and snazzy ways to keep constant monitoring. He says: ‘’building a successful system is not just about coding’’ so he’s now planning to start a retail copy-trading option. For details contact info@thestophunter.co.uk and/or subscribe to his YouTube channel.