INTERVIEW
“The beauty of technical analysis is that it’s not just a great story; it also works in reality. ”
Where Math And Finance Collide
Looking Forward With Jeff Parent
Jeff Parent has been providing wealth management services to his high net worth clients since 1992. From many years of experience, he has become proficient in portfolio management techniques and has a broad knowledge of estate and tax planning. In his portfolio management role at Quadrexx Asset Management, he applies a strong price discipline to help control risk and improve returns. His specialty is technical analysis with a focus on quantitative methods. He regularly appears on Business News Network and is a recognized writer, public speaker, and educator. Parent is also the past president of the Canadian Society of Technical Analysts.
Stocks & Commodities Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan interviewed Jeff Parent on October 8, 2009.
Jeff, what attracted you to technical analysis?
I always had an interest in math and finance. When I was 15, my dad had this idea on how we could make money selling personalized mortgage tables. So we bought a personal computer in the early 1980s, which at the time was unusual. We showed people how changing or accelerating their mortgage payments could save them a lot of money — interest rates were high back then, if you’ll recall. So we turned it into a business and since I did the computer programming myself, I saw firsthand how math and finance intersected. That created an interest that has lasted over the years.
When did you start your financial career?
I started off working for a financial planner who sold mutual funds and life insurance. There wasn’t a lot of math in that, but calculating the returns for the clients did involve some. Eventually, I got interested in getting into stocks and bonds working for an investment firm in 1997. That’s when the idea of technical analysis came to me, because when you’re a stockbroker, you’re trying to differentiate yourself from all the others. And going out there and talking about the same mutual funds or the same stock that everyone else is talking about doesn’t allow you to do that. Even the research wasn’t very different, and it didn’t seem to be as critical as it should have been. And these days, brokers are selling essentially the same in-house products so it’s hard to differentiate yourself. So technical analysis was something you could talk to people about. You could talk about some of the main aspects of technical analysis, like looking at a chart, or the discipline, or something other than just the buy & hold approach.
How do people respond to it?
People found it interesting because they could understand the direct relationship to risk reduction and technical analysis, which is a key element that is often overlooked. The other thing people liked about it was that you had a two-sided view of the market. I started off by buying MetaStock, software that had been recommended to me. I didn’t know much about it at the time, so I bought a copy of the book Technical Analysis From A To Z by Steven B. Achelis, the developer of MetaStock.
After I read that, I joined a Toronto MetaStock users group run by Dave Flemming. This group had meetings a couple times a month. What Flemming did was make everybody give some input and a presentation. So when it was my turn, he said: “Jeff, you have to do a presentation. You have to talk about the Macd.”
What did you do?
I thought I would look at the history of the moving average convergence/divergence (Macd). So I called Gerald Appel and ended up buying one of his videos and learned not only how it came about but how it was modified. So I started my exploration on things like the Macd and the relative strength index (Rsi) and worked up to chart patterns.