Eoin Treacy's view

The MTA Symposium drew a record number of attendees this year, from all over the world, which is a further testament that we remain in a persistent bull market. This year’s theme was on beating the benchmark which set me to ruminate on the role of career risk and fees in sustaining an environment where the majority of mutual funds underperform. I concentrated the first part of my presentation on highlighting how equal weighting, dividends and currencies contribute to total return, The second part of my presentation talked about international exposure and how the Autonomies benefit from major themes such as the rise of the global middle class, the accelerating pace of technological innovation and the lower price of energy in real terms. Here is a link to the pdf. 

Congratulations to Walter Deemer, a long-time friend of FullerTreacyMoney, for whom this year’s conference was a lap of honour in thanks for his decades of service to the field of technical analysis. 

One of the more interesting presentations I attended was from a company creating market timing tools from Twitter feeds. iSentium takes in posts from approximately 300,000 active twitter users, employs a keyword search and plots the trend of mentions of the company. While they claim to cover 7000 instruments it appears that the most liquid universe in terms of social media is approximately 100 instruments, primarily liquid ETFs. They have plans to expand their coverage and what they can do with their data but I suspect growth will be dependent on the number of Twitter feeds increasing substantially. There is definitely something of interest in the garnering of trading ideas from social media for short-term traders, not least during market events such as earnings announcements, but it still appears to be an immature sector.