We started the New Year on a positive note, receiving recognition fin the 2015 Acquisition International Hedge Fund Awards as “Best Technical Analysis for Futures Market – UK”.

We have no idea who nominated us for this, or who voted for us either, but we’d like to thank you! We await the glassware to add to the cabinet alongside last year’s 3 Awards in the Technical Analyst Awards.

It has been a busy start to the year in the markets and we received lots of interest for my recent Blog Post on the Swiss Franc Debacle.

This has led to being asked to become a regular contributor to the online Industry magazine “Forex Magnates”. Below are links to our first couple of posts:

http://forexmagnates.com/things-hotting-charts-say-ahead-ecb-tomorrow/ 

http://forexmagnates.com/cable-bulls-showing-signs-life-charts/

We have also spent January going over our performance for 2014 and were pleased to note some consistent and pleasing results for our trend following analysis.

In the Bund Futures, for example, we have discovered  that (using our proprietary “SkewBars” indicator as a proxy) we were bullish on all but 9 days in the last year and only bearish on ONE day.

Similarly in Brent Crude Oil we were consistently Bearish from July 1st onwards. When I say “consistently” I mean there were just THREE days between then and last Friday when the SkewBar was not flagging further weakness. So we’ve been bearish since Brent broke $112, BUT have just changed skew YESTERDAY, to bullish.

While hindsight tells us that these were fairly obvious trends there are many other people and many other methodologies, both Technical and Fundamental, which would not have stuck with these moves or possibly even would have attempted to bat against them.

We have recently called a bottom in Brent Crude (in fact as far back as the start of the month we “called” that we it wouldn’t hit the $30s), so we’ll see in time if we are still on a good run!

What are “SkewBars”? Click here for our Blog post from 2009 when we first introduced this trend following tool.

Equities have been tougher, although we’ve managed to navigate January pretty well so far, favouring the bulls for choice on this side of the pond, whilst sitting things out with respect to events Stateside. The recent wide range/chop has been navigated fairly safely thanks to our reliance on Auction Market Theory; another name for longer term Market Profile/Volume at Price Analysis.

Which brings me neatly on to the next bit of news: Next Tuesday (February 10th) I will be speaking at the UK Society of Technical Analysts. My talk is entitled “Advancements in Market Profile/Auction Market Theory”. After Robin Mesch’s excellent talk at the 2014 IFTA Conference I hope to add something to the equation with respect to the subject and look forward to seeing familiar frineds and faces. March will see me delivering the “full talk” on the subject for the STA’s yearly Diploma Course, for the 8th year in a row.

Finally we have decided to offer a “Beta Test” service on the website (and via Skype and SMS) for Forex Traders; a “Chart Chat Room” from 8.30am to 3.30pm daily, with updates from the excellent Nicola Duke, aka @nictrades on Twitter. I will also add my two pen‘north as and when required!

We invite you to join the Beta test. Please reply to this e-mail with your Mobile numbers and/or Skype ID and we’ll be in touch to set it up.

Please hit “Reply” for any other queries or questions you may have about the service, or if you would like a free trial. Remember we also offer “White Label” analysis if you wish to provide your clients with quality daily chart analysis, something that our current White Label partners value greatly.

All the best,

Clive.