December

I have recently been busy writing my thesis, and now that it has been graded and published I would like to do a short review about the subject. 

The quantitative research was carried out by first introducing concepts of technical analysis and by studying historical price data from a five-year time frame. The price data of the instruments was selected randomly from four different samples of asset classes. These segments included then 18 different derivative instruments. The price charts were then studied form a market technique- based strategy’s viewpoint: The strategy aims to find spots in the market, where movement will appear probably. The periods, through which the prices were studied, were also selected randomly from a 20-year timeframe. These fictitious order executions were obtained by entering the buying and selling signals into a table.  From these prices could then be the instruments behavior describing statistics derived.

 The results of the different instruments can be seen in the following pictures.

 In the first two columns we can see how many bullish, bearish and neutral periods each instrument had. Then we have columns with the signals given by the tested strategy,

Where the yellow highlighted cells represent numbers that are sums and the grey areas averages.

The quantitative results of the research showed that technical analysis can be used to some extent to gain continuously positive returns. As the research showed that instruments behave differently, the measure of profitability depends highly on the perspective from which the results are examined. Altogether, the scope of this study was to investigate, analyze and develop the field of technical analysis. As we can see in the tables, the commodities and index derivatives were clearly the most profitable instruments on average. The presented strategy represents a simple trend detection method that can easily be enhanced by adding terms and conditions.

Buy gold now?

EUROSTOXX and SMI open with a gap down

What happens next ?

According to a market technical strategy, we would have a bundle of sell orders just waiting to be filled below the recent low. But according to some other technical strategies, now would be a good time to buy. If the recent low will be broken, the DAX will most definitely be in a bear market at least the rest of the year.

Since we have a 96% correlation between the Dax and Eurostoxx, the same applies here. I am looking for a pullback and a movement trough 2972,7 that is where I place my order. I am also open for a major bullish correction.

Some successful trades I made this week

Although my bachelors thesis will be written about a market technical strategy, I haven´t had much time to monitor the markets. Still I managed to pull of some positive returns with FTSEMIB and IBEX 35. Since the week started looking bearish on those indices, I was positioned bearish myself.
Despite we do not have definite sings of a trend  reversal on the weekly chart with these indices, the daily chart is starting to look like a bear market.
                                                             
                                                                    IBEX 35 H1

FTSEMIB H1

How the quants of wall street affect the financial markets

When it takes about four seconds a human to read a tweet, an algorithmic trading system needs only a few microseconds to read a significant article, process the information and make trades. A human can´t compete with these algorithms, since it takes a human brain too long to process the same amount of information.  These algorithms have created a new ecosystem in the recent five years that is taking over. It seems scary that the markets are no longer controlled by humans, because we are dependent on commodities. Sean Gourley explains the "ecosystem"  of algorithmic trading in the following video. 

Always look at the big picture

Like you should not have a long position on the S&P 500 at the same time as you are short on the Dow Jones, you should apply the same rule to different time frames. A trader should always remember to look first  at the "general weather situation" before moving on to smaller time frames. One can see a trend reversal on a 15 minute chart but when looking at the daily chart, it appears only to be a correction of a bullish trend. The "the trend is your friend" rule applies also here.

Here is one example of a well constructed position:

Picture 1. We start the trading session by looking at the daily EUROSTOXX chart. We are                   now at breaking point 2 and see that this could be used as a trend confirmation.

Picture 2. Next we move to a samaller timeframe, for example the hourly chart. We can now identify a formation here and place our order. The direction of the position is now the same as the direction of the main trend.

Picture 3. to give you a hint what it would look like on the 15 min chart.