Past Presentations

March 29, 2007 1. Lloyd F. did an excellent presentation on Swing Trading and Option Strategies. You can watch it here. 2. David L. showed us his interesting indicator based on Standard Error. Here are the AFL codes for Amibroker: linton_SER SEO5.afl and linton_StdErrOsc5.afl. January 26, 2006 Robert Deel was in town for the Financial Forum and dropped by to pass along his wisdom.  This is the second annual visit by Robert.  Let's hope he makes regular trips! Daniel E. also prepared a small presentation on using COT data. December 21, 2005 Year-End Wrap Up Party at Jack Astor's courtesy of the CSTA. November 24, 2005 We examined commodity charts and compared to stocks.  Trading commodities using the Horizon BetaPro funds was discussed. October 27, 2005 A presentation created by Tomasz Janeczko of Amibroker for the upcoming IFTA conference was shown and discussed.  September 29, 2005 Attendees discussed position sizing, risk management, and trading psychology using recent trades as the basis for discussion. August 25, 2005 George Radan came by to help us out with the topic of risk management. He offers technical analysis courses and is a professional trader. He picked up a lot of very useful knowledge while trading millions of dollars each day in the energy markets. He taught us how to assess risk and reduce losses. July 28, 2005 Filtering and Filters We had a group discussion on how filters are used. Filters were developed to find stocks with different volatility and liquidity characteristics. Filters can also be used to find stocks that have had recent buy and sell triggers. June 30, 2005 Two Ideas 1) John CW did some amazing work with volume analysis. Using statistics, he looks for relationships between news, unusual volume and returns. He compares his results to the conventional wisdom. Download his power-point presentation. 2) First time presenter Bev updates us on his cycle work. Part of the method is measuring the ratio of high and low points made between 36-day breakouts. May 26, 2005 Volatility Adjusted Relative Strength Jeff P. showed us his MTA conference presentation on a volatility adjusted relative strength method. May 1, 2005 HOTAD IV We all had a lot of fun, and learned some things too. Thanks to all participants. Thanks to the hotel and their staff for providing great food and service. April 28, 2005 Volume's Value Group discussion on the topic of first, using price only to decipher charts, then how volume plays a role. We developed an indicator to show normalized price and volume trends. No clear opinions flowed from the effort, but we did uncover some interesting areas of investigation for future exploration. March 31, 2005 1) Daniel E. described and demonstrated a couple of software titles. MLDownloader downloads free data over the internet for a large variety of local and international stocks. It stores into Metastock format and(!) automatically updates stock lists. The other package called Camtasia Studio records screen shots as video complete with sound recordings and cursor movements. It can be used as a great form of trader's notebook. 2) We finished up the code for the breakout pattern that began in November last year. February 24, 2005 John C. presented some great long term charts of various markets. Discussion ensued on charting and chart topics. January 27, 2005 Robert Deel Guest presenter and well known market technician, Robert Deel, dropped in for a visit. In town for the Financial Forum, Robert offered his trading wisdom to our group. He described certain effective trading patterns and introduced us to his new Metastock plug-in. December 15, 2004 Year-End Social Featuring dinner and dancing (well maybe not dancing) into the early hours of the evening, this event was well attended and gave us all a chance to meet on a social level. Sharing ideas over beer and burgers is a nice change of pace! November 25, 2004 The Challenge A general challenge was issued by one of our members. Attendees were asked to develop a method to find stocks ready for upside breakouts. We started off by defining a breakout, then moved to a discussion about what sort of indicators to use. A first attempt to develop a scan helped us better define search criteria. We left the challenge open for follow-up at an upcoming meeting. October 28, 2004 General Meeting We went around the table asking everyone to give us their insights and share their ideas. September 30, 2004 Backtesting Equis, the developers of Metastock, visit Toronto on a regular basis. They promote their backtester and other features of the software. Since there can be bias in these presentations, we wanted to put the backtester through a rigorous test. We did this during the meeting and what happened was quite surprising. Testing to see if past results could be repeated in the future, we did find in our first run that backtesting help in trading. We followed a method and chose a system and stock combination that traded well in the past. When we did the walk forward test, good results continued into the future. Our testing is limited, but does show some hope for backtesting. August 19, 2004 Sector Analysis 1) Collecting Data: The first step in sector analysis is matching stocks with their sectors. Of course, sectors need to be defined. S&P and Morgan Stanley developed Global Industry Classifications. A list of stocks with their sectors can be downloaded free from the S&P website. GICS consists of 10 sectors aggregated from 24 industry groups, 62 industries, and 132 sub-industries. Unfortunately, the site does not provide a free listing of stocks with all the sector breakdowns or include all stocks. Yahoo does a good job of this though. Many software packages are now including sector based stock segregation in their standard packages. Amibroker and Metastock offer great tools to manage sectors. For us Canadians, complete sector information is not readily available. Many services exclude small and micro-cap stocks even though these stocks can add a lot of information to sector analysis. You have to manually add these stocks to their sectors 2) Sector Strength: Once the stocks are segregated into their sectors and industry group, composites need to be created. Most analysis work is at the sub-industries level. This is where you will find the highest degree of correlation amongst stocks. A sector composite shows how stocks in the group are trending. The higher the degree of correlation of movements of stocks within the group, the more clear a trend will be. Narrow based businesses, like gold companies, tend to move together quite well. Composites are easy to create. Daily rates of change within the group are averaged. More complicated schemes weight the rates of change by market cap, for example. There are a variety of other methods. Relative indexes are an additional step. This removes some market 'noise' from the composite and gives a more clear picture of sector strength. To calculate, divide the sector index by a general index or subtract the daily market change from the sector change. For straight forward and quick analysis, many on-line services already have made these calculations. See John Bollinger's Equity Trader 3) Stock selection: Sectors of interest can be traded using exchange traded funds, or you can try to identify stocks within the sectors with good potential. ETFs usually hold larger cap stocks. If you want to focus on small caps within a sector, you probably will need to trade the stocks individually. July 29, 2004 Trading Systems 1) Charles Tanti described the development and results of his ATS-3200 T-Bond trading system. Featured in Futures Truth magazine, his system ranks highest in the single commodity category. He offers a free on-line course explaining how his system functions. 2) Dave H. provided us with some background into his trading system. June 24, 2004 Various We chatted a bit about the markets and some individual trades we've done. Jeff P. described the 'hysteresis' transform. May 27, 2004 Technical Quality Indicator We discussed the term 'quality', and came up with a list of elements defining quality. Key items were: consistency in price and volume, price level, dollar volume traded and days traded. This was developed into an exploration (Metastock and Amibroker code). Quality in this sense does not imply profit potential. It helps to determine if technical analysis indicators can be used with the stock. We screened the TSX Venture Exchange list for potential trading candidates. April 29, 2004 Buy on the Dip We were introduced to the 'dip buyers' and 'pullback buyers' strategy. Daniel demonstrated the a long only approach where a stock is bought on an 8% pullback from yesterday's close, and sold at the next day's open. Have a look at the good list of scripts on the Wealth-Lab site for more info. More testing of the concept is needed, but early results look interesting. The important factor seems to be taking a lot of positions. Automated ordering is necessary to accomplish this. March 25, 2004 General Group Discussion In the spirit of sharing ideas, we openly talked about our latest activities. February 26, 2004 Placing Stops First up was an update from Daniel on his Chart Pattern Software. It is very close to perfection. Next up was an answer to the often asked question: When do i exit? Asked by David H., the group worked out an answer. Volatility plays a crucial role in exit strategies. It is also tied in to money management. Some highlights: 1) The higher the volatility of a stock, the lower the stop should be placed to reduce whipsaws. Stops should be placed in accordance with your expectation of the stock movement. Is the stock breaking out, or are you buying on a dip? Tighter stops can be placed on counter-trend entries. By placing stops, you will have an initial expectation of maximum loss. Allocate funds accordingly. 2) Volatility should be measured in the time frame expected of the trade. The longer the time frame, the higher the potential volatility, and probably the less capital that should be allocated to the trade. In other words, if you trade off weekly charts, you should be more diversified, or invest in less risky stocks. We also wrote an exploration to uncover market volatility. This is a type of market breadth indicator. January 29, 2004 Automated Chart Pattern Recognition Daniel has been developing a chart pattern recognition plug-in for Wealth Lab. He showed how a user would enter a description of the pattern in general terms. The Gartley pattern was used as an example. Although Daniel's program is quite complicated, it is easy to use. December 17, 2003 Year-End Social Held at Jimmy's Place in BCE Place. Good turnout and good food as usual. Thanks to Steve for organizing the event. Martin Pring joined us courtesy of Recognia. He talked about some research he is including in an upcoming book to be released later this year. November 27, 2003 StockCharts.com Andy put together a very thorough presentation (ppt format) on StockCharts.com. He highlighted very useful visual analysis methods like Market Carpets and Performance Charts. This is a great website offering lots of free tools and low cost premium services. The second part of Andy's presentation covered chart patterns. October 30, 2003 Integrating Trade, Analysis, and Data Platforms The future of Technical Analysis software was the topic of the evening. Lead by Daniel E., the discussion covered the evolution of TA software, how various parts are being integrated, and the importance of programming skills to take advantage of all the features. Examples from Wealth Lab were shown. September 24, 2003 Visualization Night Putting together an effective template can lead to success. The presentation contained samples from various software packages. August 21, 2003 Penny Stock Night Group Discussion: Thinly traded stocks, depth of the Venture Exchange, special considerations when developing a penny stock trading systems. July 31, 2003 Mutual Fund Night Group Discussion: Aspects of Mutual Funds (closed vs. open end funds, sector specific, small cap/large cap, etc.), mutual fund trading systems and differences from stock trading systems. June 28, 2003 CSTA Annual Conference The theme was "Mind and Matter". Presentations by Mark Douglas, Prof. Larry Harris, Art Collins, Robert Deel and Daniel Gramza. Join the CSTA today! May 25, 2003 HOTAD II (Hands-On Technical Analysis Day) Thanks to Gary Miskin of Questrade for hosting the event at their offices. About 40 people showed up throughout the day to meet one another. Many ideas were shared. Lots was learned. You are encouraged to visit their offices. They are located near Yonge and Sheppard (5001 Yonge St.). Call before going. Gary's number is 416-227-9876. April 24, 2003 1) Nick Nardella of Cornerstone put together a great options presentation. He trades for a living and has worked as an instructor for Pristine. He also holds monthly options meetings in Mississauga and runs a very instructive seminar. Contact Nick for more details. 2) Daniel E. did a quick presentation on Wealth Lab. He discussed its many merits. Daniel will be doing a more thorough examination of the program for us in an upcoming meeting. March 27, 2003 Swing Trading Night 1) John's excellent slide show (700kb) was done in power point. It covered all the basics and then some more advanced stuff. He wrote an Amibroker plugin (33kb) to assist in the drawing of swing lines. 2) David's great follow-up presentation, also in powerpoint format, covered some ideas from Pristine.com. February 27, 2003 Relative Rate-of-Change: How a simple indicator can help in identifying market moves. The slide show was done in power point, so you will need a viewer or the program. Amibroker was used to create the code. The code is presented here in a Word document. January 30, 2003 1) Welcomed first time attendees, especially those from the Financial Forum 2) Discussed the Financial Forum and its presenters 3) Opening Range Studies presentation by Daniel, click here for slideshow. Download the code for AmiBroker here. 4) Larry Harris' '93 paper The Winners and Losers of the Zero Sum Game can be downloaded here. November 28, 2002 1) Welcomed first time attendees 2) highlighted the ideas of TASUG 3) discussed December party, will work on providing details ASAP 4) Visualization Techniques presentation by jeff, click here for slideshow with notes (works best with IE4 and up) October 24, 2002 John C. Update of software developed by John. The TSTS is available for trial and purchase at MarketTide.com. Software keeps track of trades, and charts equity lines, calculates results, etc. Jeff P. Overview of three-line break plug-in for Amibroker, available at Amibroker Plug-In site Charts of Interest Chart dissection of some popular TSX stocks. September 26, 2002 Options Industry Council In lieu of this months meeting, TMUGers attended a special educational seminar put on by the OIC. Visit their site for details of upcoming events. August 25, 2002 Hands-on Technical Analysis Day (HOTAD I) Much was learned. Much was eaten. Thanks to Daniel for the knowledge and equipment. Thanks for all who showed up. Thanks to the folks at the Holiday Inn for their great service and food. We had a quite the international group, from Ottawa to London, about 26 people showed up for the day. Much was learned, and lots of info was shared. We look forward to the next event. Watch out for a posting to the past presentations area for links to material mentioned. Dave Jenning's Code Snippets and the Metastock Formula Primer - 2002 (Metastock is a registered trademark of Equis International) are available here. These were first mentioned by David L. at HOTAD I. Click the links to download. July 25, 2002 John C. 1) John gets published! As first seen in our April '02 meeting, his article on 3-line break system to appear in popular trading mag. 2) Overview of software developed by John. The TSTS is available for trial and purchase at MarketTide.com. Software keeps track of trades, and charts equity lines, calculates results, etc. Jeff P. Developed indicator melding moving average crossover system with volume. Uses an undocumented feature of Metastock. Well, it's not quite a feature, more like a work-around. Demonstrated the indicator on a pseudo data and regular data. June 27, 2002 Jeff Review of the recent CSTA annual conference. A volatility indicator was created based on the ideas of Bollinger and L.McMillan. The full presentation can be viewed on-line. Discussed Linda Bradford's tick data. John Cr. Detailed the Disparity and Divergence indicators with examples. For those looking for the Divergence indicator from the July'02 TASC article, click here. May 30, 2002 Daniel Here's some links for information used in Daniel's presentation. March 28, 2002 Gunter Great presentation on Bollinger Bands. Based on the book Bollinger on Bollinger Bands. Described %b normalization and how it is applied to price and to RSI and MFI indicators to enhance the value other signals. Lots of stuff on the Bollinger's website, complete with tutorials, etc. John Cr. Reviewed Personal Stock Monitor software from DTLink Software. Very neat for real-time charting, portfolio management, etc. Requires data provider (can use free data from Yahoo too!). Program does the rest. Free trial available. Jeff P. Continuation of the Expert Advisor discussion. Showed how multiple indicators can be shown with the "Symbol" and "Highlights" feature of the Advisor. Instead of using a binary wave to show balance of bull and bear indicators, the advisor can more specifically highlight indicator values. Indicators are binary weighted unlike the binary wave method which assigns a 1 value to each bullish indicator value. February 22, 2002 Jeff P. Integrating various indicators into an Exploration and Expert. An example showed how an Expert is used to colour bars based on RSI value, and at the same time can add symbols to a chart showing where MACD crossover occur. January 31, 2002 Neil S. Scans for changes in Value Line's Timeliness, Safety, and Technical figures, to select trading candidates John Cr. Update on Archer Analysis' point and figure charting package Bull's-Eye Broker. Version 3.5 is now available. John Ca. Review of Sydney Tremayne's "Take the Guessing Out of Investing". Focused on length and slopes of Elliot wave cycles, how they are measured and adjusted to set protective trailing stops. Jerry G. Look-Forward Indicator idea. What must the close be tomorrow to have the MACD crossover the 0 line, and the trigger line? Click here for the code. December 20, 2001 No meeting (Christmas Party) November 28, 2001 Roland B. 1) Discussed how he creates 'synthetic' weekly indicators with daily data (think 20 week and 20 day moving averages shown with daily chart), and 2) Described a short term mutual fund arbitrage strategy, taking advantage of local and international time differences with mutual funds which are only priced once a day. October 25, 2001 Ivan M. One of the first users of Metastock, and a founding member of the TMUG, Ivan regaled us with his wonderful history of trading in the markets. He started with a pork belly contract in 1981, and then moved on to other tradables. Over time, he refined his methods to achieve a winning approach. Moving averages play an important part in the system, although Ivan has reached a point where he has become his system. In other words, practice, diligence, and a devotion to chart analysis has enabled Ivan to hone his abilities to a point where signals can be seen without being shown on a chart! September 27, 2001 Rob B. Very complete and well written Sentiment Indicators, a must read. August 30, 2001 John C. Review of Bull's-Eye Broker , a point and figure charting package. Daniel E. Update on his work-in-progress. He is collecting options data and manipulating to create a data series to be used in a neural network. The data is collected from The Better Software People, a good source for detailed options trading data. July 26, 2001 Jeff P. 1) Peter G. Eliades' Sign of the Bear (winner of the 2001 MTA Charles H. Dow Award) click here for "Sign of the Bear" MetaStock formula 2) Weighted Moving Average System inspired by a Neil S. presentation click here to see examples and the code June, 2001 No meeting (summer break) May 31, 2001 George C. Lindahl Sell Rule and Higher Low Six Weeks in a Row Sell Signal (click link to download Lindahl Expert, to install, double click lindahl.exe file) The Lindahl rule comes from Timing the Stock Market Jeff P A brief introduction to the DeBry.com SpyGlass plug-in John C. Chart of Interest: GOLD April 26, 2001 Jeff P Building a Multi-Security System Tester exploration using the Cum() function Neil S Chart of Interest: Microsoft March 29, 2001 Jeff P What's new at Equis, review of MetaStock version 7.2 End-of-Day Bob H Cycles! Cycles! Cycles! February 22, 2001 Jerry G Edward Yanis and his Y-Process Dejan Using ADX as an Indicator of Trending January 25, 2001 Dan E Trading Equities Using Patterns methods: ID/NR4, ID/NR7, & Historical Volatility Jeff P Book Review (Charles H. Dow and the Dow Theory) Fun with the Metastock Developers Kit Pending Research Report - Sector Correlation Matrices November 30, 2000 Bora K Metastock Data File containing indicators Rob B Selected charts