Market ThinkTank is a group of highly trained market professionals with experience in frontier and emerging markets disciplines, offering training services for trading,investments and Portfolio Planing/Management and much more.
With the beginning of the year, we’ve had a lot going on here at Market ThinkTank. It’s been over 5 years now since our first Technical Analysis course we offered to our audience under the banner name of Society of Technical Analysts Pakistan in 2014.
The idea for the website first came up in 2014. The intention was to register the calls on market, a technical analysis blog. I wanted to share ideas about what I’m seeing around the market. We started this blog in 2017, this small blog quickly turned into hundreds of unique visitors from across the world who wanted to learn and know about what’s happening around the world technically.
Since September, 2007 to date (more than a decade now) I am managing a sovereign fund of one of the most reputed financial institution in Pakistan (Pak Brunei Investment Company ltd.) ,with the goal of managing equity exposure with risk adjusted return consistently over the years. After several years of requests from all over the world, we launched Market ThinkTank Platform in 2017 to provide technical analysis training and commentary across all asset classes to investors worldwide.
We also launched a Training Course, which is an Educational segment of the site dedicated to helping users grow their knowledge of technical analysis. I encourage you to go check out curriculum of our courses.
I grew up in one of the most populous cities in the world Karachi, Pakistan. I’m a big Polo fanatic. When I am not looking at charts, I’m probably either Playing or watching a Polo game. Many times it’s a combination of the all of them. I’m not really into golf. I’ve only met Hamid Ali (Coach Polo Team u0026amp; Equestrian Club in England) once and his advice was,
If you want to catch a ball, be with the smartest player of the opposite team, he will take you to ball”.
I still remember the exposure of Technical Analysis, I got first time when my father (Mr. Mir Alam Khan) asked me to read a Technical Analysis report, he introduced me to Technical analysis when I was just 16 years old. Thank You Dad!
I graduated from University of Karachi with a degree in Finance and completed Specialization in Business and Financial Modeling from The Wharton School. I have spent more than 13 years in total in Investment Management Industry, primarily in Portfolio Management, Strategy building u0026amp; Advance Technical Research on Frontier and Emerging Markets.
During my stint at a brokerage house, I was initially very intimidated with people sitting around me at work that were twice my age, and in some cases 3 times my age, that pretended to have a through insights on the market. I guess I was just fortunate enough to quickly realize that these people didn’t know anything and they were not adding value to theirs clients or themselves.
I started reading Technical Analysis literature. I spent a lot more time on reading and understanding Bob Prechter’s blog and I was a subscriber of his blog for very long time. Half way through Pring Martin’s book, Technical Analysis Explained, I thought I could be the next George Sores at the age of 22 Years because I started trading in Gold and made “luckly” good gains during the run in 2007. But little do I know that I had to learn a lot more in this journey.
After enrolling into and passing all three levels of Chartered Market Technician® program, In 2015 I was awarded the prestigious CMT® Charter by the CMT Association and thus by became The first investment Manager in Pakistan to be able to use the CMT® designation .Later went on achieve CFTe designation in 2019. Prior to enrolling myself into the CMT program, I naively believed that I’m an expert in Technical Analysis, The program was an eye opener for me and made me realize how little I knew.
In 2020, Ehtesham started his own venture EK Global Capital (www.ekglobalcapital.com), a registered and licensed investment advisory firm by SECP, where I manage my investor’s pool of funds as a security adviser under my discretionary mandate.
Over the course of my career I have experienced multiple cycles of bulls and bear spells to understand the fact that I don’t know anything at all. No one does. The market is going to do what it wants and it doesn’t care what any of us think, especially me.
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing” Plato
So I’ve learned the hardway that, the less you predict the better you will be. Fact says, no one can tell what will happen, we learn this fact gradually, it’s been an iterative learning process.
I can’t predict the future, but I can understand present.
I more often employ the use of Japanese Candlesticks for my regular analysis. I usually traverse data set weekly and monthly for better understanding of the market direction. I keep my chart clean and minimalistic– just Price and Volume. You’d be surprised how much clarity you can see in a chart when you remove all the clutters.
Because I believe clarity lies in Simplicity.
Same goes true for the trading time horizon. I look out weeks and months. I don’t believe in day trading, but I also don’t try to expect what happens next year. It’s an intermediate-term time horizon. Not too long-term and not immediate term either. I don’t believe in long-term,
“In the long run we are all dead” John Maynard Keynes
For better understanding of market direction, I use Trend Lines. This helps with the day to day or week to week changes in a trend. If you’re using candlesticks or bar charts for trend, you should consider highs and lows of the charts otherwise line chart can be used.
Moreover, I like to use Sentiment and intermarket analysis to complement all of the price activity across markets. But in terms of my chart setup, this is my analysis work flow which is a result of rigorous fine tuning over the years. This is the journey of perfection that will continue.
The market has taught me, the hard way, to leave my ego behind and always “Accept” that none of us know anything about future. Never try to predict future, just follow trend at its best, we can’t be leader in any market but we can be the first follower in the league.
“It’s not about being Right all the time, its about not being wrong most of the time”
I hope my humble thoughts have added value to you! Thank you for visitng MarketThinkTank.com. I invite you to join us.
Ehtesham Khan, CMT, CFTe Founder, Market ThinkTank