We have created an infographic about calendar effects:

Experts at the London Stock Exchange believe that a huge proportion of trading is now done using algorithms. In some markets, it's estimated to be around 80 percent of trading volumes, which means that it's become a huge part of financial trading. Software that can recognise patterns and make the appropriate trades is now in very high demand, with many people willing to pay large sums of money for the technology. This is prevalent across the board, with stocks, currency and commodities all involved. The question then, is how effective is this method of trading, and is it better than manual chart observation?

 

Chartoasis.com has started a new site about historical data, www.historicaldatadirectory.com . We will collect all of our knowledge about historical there.

Technological evolution does not avoid investment tools, either. They improve continuously, new tools appear, old ones become more sophisticated and cheaper so it worths to have a look at new ones.

1. Charts & chart softwares

The largest evolution of investment tools can be observed in the area of chart softwares. The range of provided services became wider, and a lot of old services ara available for free today.

 

Almost everybody is asking on the Wall Street in each December if there will be a Santa Claus Rally.

Let's see the chances of having a Santa Claus Rally this year, based on statistics!

A little bit about statistics...

One can prepare statistics for Santa Claus Rally in many ways. As I see, people do not even agree on when it begins or when it ends.

I wanted to know how often prices rise between the beginning and the end of December and how much the average increase is. You can see an example below.

Lot's of rumors are told about Santa Claus Rally. Significantly less exact charts can be seen about it, though a good chart could make clear a lot of things.

What does a Santa Claus Rally chart have to be like?

Having read a lot of articles about Santa Claus Rally I realized that people do not really agree on when it begins and when it ends. Somebody says it is just the beginning of the January effect, others tell it may begin in November or it is just the couple days at the end of the year.

For a user's request we have implemented forex data support in Chartoasis Sesame.

Using Sesame for forex is not a bad idea: by using monthly statistics you can identify months for some currency pairs where the chance of going up is 3 times more than going down!

The source of forex data is Stooq.com. You can find a detailed guide on how to dowload data from Stooq here.

From today you can use monthly statistics, performance comparison and long term performance analysis for currency pairs, too.

NSE Inida has changed the history data file format recently. It was not a major change but Chartoasis.com's free stock analizer software was not prepared to load these files by default. We have corrected the problem on 2011-12-11.

Hopefully users from India will find a great use of our chart application for a long time
Please do not hesitate to contact us in case of problems related to the chart application. Thanks to a user email we detected the change of file format a lot earlier!

We also updated our help document for downloading market date from NSEIndia.com.

The "GBP USD" currency pair has correlated almost exactly with the trending behavior of its rival, the "EUR USD", over the past twelve months. Although the United Kingdom is independent from Europe, its banks still have many European bond securities on their respective balance sheets and export trade relationships are also entwined enough to provide additional linkage in the Pound's tendencies versus the Euro. Favorable economic data has buoyed the Pound of late, and data releases to come may reinforce the current positive moves.

The "EUR USD" currency pair has been on a rollercoaster ride over the past year, buffeted by the hope that Western economies would somehow find the right formula for dealing with their respective debt loads and deficits while producing domestic growth worthy of recognition. Emerging markets have dominated the positive side of economic statistics for far too long, but the largest traded pair in the forex markets continues to reign supreme, as the combined strength of the United States and Europe economies still dwarfs all contenders.