INTERVIEW
Better Than Tea Leaves
Scott Brown is president of MetaStock and has been with the company for more than 13 years. Initially hired to work in the sales department, Brown soon became an integral part of the company, working in almost every department. As a product manager, he played a key role in the development of MetaStock versions 8, 9, 10, and 11. In addition to product management, Brown also managed business development and events, directed sales/marketing/support, then finally taking the position of president in 2010. In 2013, seeing a need for greater focus on the retail environment, Brown navigated the divestiture of MetaStock from Thomson Reuters.
Brown has presented at trade shows and trade associations as well as to individual traders about technical analysis and MetaStock in more than 20 countries. Stocks & Commodities Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan spoke with Brown on August 7, 2013 about using software to trade, developing systems, and the future of charting.
Scott, tell us a little bit about how you got interested in the financial markets.
When I was growing up, my mother manned the business library at Brigham Young University, and that’s where I got introduced to the financial markets. I would use the Bloomberg terminal when I accompanied her to work. While in college I worked in the business library, and after graduating, I worked for MetaStock because it was the one company in the area that was involved with the markets. MetaStock was looking for sales individuals and I worked for the company in sales. Since then, I’ve spent almost 13 years at MetaStock in sales, product management, as president, and doing everything in between. Recently, I bought the company from Thomson Reuters.
You have been with MetaStock for a while. What are some changes you have seen in charting features over the years?
One thing for sure is that markets are interconnected. These days, when you wake up in the morning and turn on the TV, or open up any type of business newspaper or website, you will see what’s going on around the world. People interested in the markets want to know what happened the night before in the Asia Pacific region, where the European markets are headed, and whether there’s been any global mishap that could affect our markets here in the US. Over the years, people have been looking at global data and trying to figure out ways to read the data correctly, in the sense of how it can help them with their trading.
You are going to be able to look at charts and see the probabilities of price movement.Markets are definitely linked and I think that’s a huge change that has happened over time, especially in the last 10 to 15 years. Another thing that has changed, of course, is the availability of charting. That’s a big change, since people can get charts from all over the world. They can get everything from their brokerages, they can get basic charts free over the Internet, and they can get advanced charts through different charting software packages.
Another major change I have seen is the growing popularity of technical analysis. If you go back 10 or 15 years, technical analysis was considered to be voodoo. I remember going into Bear Stearns when they still existed — at the time, MetaStock was owned by Reuters — because MetaStock was the only product that was allowed to be sold for their desktop when it came to advanced technical analysis. So I had the opportunity to be on the Bear Stearns trading floor. I got to see many of their traders, and I noticed there were only a handful of them who looked at or relied on technical analysis. Today, if you observe traders, you will notice that they definitely respect technical analysis more than ever. It has become much more mainstream.