AAII Cleveland Ohio Chapter

The AAII Cleveland Chapter is gauging interest in a Special Interest Group (SIG) centered around charting software, websites and other resources related to Technical Analysis.

If you have an interest, please reply to this thread and look for a survey to be posted later or by e-mail via our Cleveland Chapter mailing lists.  

Attendance:  Anyone with an Interest in the topic.  Most beneficial to those already using some sort of charting software.  This is not a beginner's class on fundamentals of either charting or technical analysis, but rather a users' group exploring how to better utilize charting software.  While relevant TA fundamentals may be explored as a prelude to a given topic, figuring out how to properly construct and analyze charts and what they are telling us will be central to our discussions.   No reservations.  Open seating up to meeting room capacity

 Disclaimer:  This is an educational study group, not an investment club.  No money is involved in any fashion, nor will any investment recommendations be made.  All participants are solely responsible for their own investing decisions at all times. 

 Software package(s) covered:  Primarily StockCharts initially; others may be added later by interested participants with other experiences. 

 Cost of attendance/participation:  free

 Potential Meeting sites:  I-77 Corridor - Independence/Brecksville libraries (~ minutes from I-77/I-480 interchange; or from intersection of Rockside Rd or Royalton Road (OH-82) and Brecksville Rd.) 

 I-71 Corridor – Middleburg Heights/Strongsville libraries (~ minutes from I-71/I-80 Ohio Turnpike interchange; Near intersection of Bagley Rd or Royalton Road (OH-82) and I-71 exits) 

 Westshore – Westlake Porter/North Olmsted libraries (~ minutes from I-480/I-90; On Center Ridge Road (US 20) or Lorain (OH 10) and Columbia Road (OH 252)

Meeting times:  monthly frequency; weekday evenings 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm; dependent on library meeting room availability

Food and beverage availability.  Many area restaurants and fast-food alternatives exist within ~5 minutes of proposed meeting sites and libraries have vending machines for snacks and beverages.   

 Typical Meeting Agenda: 

1.    Formal slide presentation on topics relating to creating/using charts (~30-40 minutes)

2.    Discussion relating to presentation

3.    Open discussion on any topic related to TA Charting

4.    Develop agenda(s) for future meetings

Useful Background References: 

·         Evidence-Based Technical Analysis:  Applying the scientific method and statistical analysis to trading signals, © 2007 by David Aronson; John Wiley, 528 pages. 

Aronson limits his tome to singular indicators and signals, and applies moderately advanced statistical analysis to determine if any of 6000+ indicator signals perform better than chance.  His analysis corrects for data mining bias in addition to statistical significance.  His bottom line:  none of the 6000+ signals/indicators perform better than chance!

 However, in closing chapters, he does comment that combinations of indicators/signals can indeed produce a result that rises above the noise. 

·         Butterfly Economics: A new general theory of social and economic behavior; © 1998 by Paul Ormerod; Pantheon Books, Div. of Random House Inc., New York; 217 pages. 

Ormerod has been the head of the Economic Assessment unit of The Economist (UK), and a visiting professor at the Universities of London and Manchester.  The main reason I'm recommending this book is because it's a beautiful example of how one should be considering the stock market as well.  Mercifully, the reader is spared the math until an appendix at the end for the truly mathematically masochistic. 

 Context:  His previous book The Death of Economics provides a background critique of classical economics for the lay public, noting that viewing the economy in mechanistic terms of independent component agents is inappropriate, because that asserts that the economy can, at infinite model complexity, be accurately modeled, which no one has succeeded in doing.  Instead, he asserts that the economy is far better modeled as a living entity, whose behavior can only be understood by looking at the complex interactions of its individual parts.  One major implication:  those interactions mean that in reality the individual players strongly influence each other, which is the opposite perspective from prior economic thinking and writing.

 Butterfly Economics employs this concept as one part of the validation process for determining what indicators and signals rise to a reliable level for detecting trend changes (aka peaks and valleys). 

·         Noise:  A flaw in human judgment, Daniel Kahmenan, Oliver Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein; © 2021 by the authors; pub by Little, Brown Spark, Hachette Book Group, NY;  454 pages.  Kahneman is also the author of Thinking Fast and Slow.  Sunstein (with Richard Thaler) authored Nudge.  Sunstein authored You're About To Make a Terrible Mistake. 

 From the dust jacket:  A revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, and how to control both noise and cognitive bias.  Error (Noise) in data is of two forms:  system noise (scatter around the mean) and cognitive bias (consistent shift in mean from its "true" value).  Even fingerprints and DNA analysis are prone to the same kinds of error as other forensic tests!!  Wherever there is judgment, there is noise.  The authors even deal with issues of diversity and equity. 

 ·         Thought Contagion:  How Belief Spreads Through Society / The New Science of Memes; © 1996 by Aaron Lynch ; pub by Basic Books div of HarperCollins, NY; 192 pages. 

From the dust jacket:  Memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas, but how ideas accumulate people.  In memetic evolution, the "fittest ideas" are not always the truest or most helpful but the ones best at self-replication.  [Personal opinion:  this book can be seen as a guidebook for the creation of Project 2025, predating that one by 20+ years.  It even contains coverage of such strategies as obfuscation, swamping with sheer numbers of distractions, and how to systematically dismantle existing power structures.] 

 So please reply and start discussion on this potential new subgroup and provide direction to us in the discovery and planning process. 

1. Booking meeting locations, sending e-mail meeting notices, maintaining communications with meeting site provider.
2. Monitoring and responding to questions on a discussion site
3. Presenting sessions on a given charting package or use
4. Conducting Zoom meeting tasks for simulcast events

Thank you.