Toronto Chapter of The Canadian Society of Technical Analysts
Speaker: Cory Venable, CMT Market Analyst and Portfolio Manager with Venable Park Investment Counsel
Mr. Venable is the market analyst, portfolio manager and co-founder at Venable Park Investment Counsel Inc. Cory’s journey from soldier/U.N Peacekeeper to the investment industry provides a unique and unconventional view of asset management.
Having started his financial career with Royal Trust Advisory Services 1990-93 followed by 10 yrs at Scotia Capital, Cory left the sell-side after the Tech wreck convinced him that conventional firms were more concerned with career risk and maintaining group think, than the math of loss and long term damage to client assets. In 2003 he co-founded Venable-Park with an inverse focus on managing risk, rather than selling it to clients. To illustrate just how inverse their process is, in all negative market years since and including 2008, client accounts saw positive gains.
Venable-Park is one of the few macro-technical, absolute return firms in North America where investment mandates allow a shift to zero% equity weighting using a quantitative set of measures re-worked from Cory’s 3rd year CMT paper on “translation bias” (published in the 2006 Journal of Technical Analysis issue #64).
The firm was founded on the premise that investment advisors must be fiduciaries that put the best interests of clients and their capital protection above all else. In all efforts, the firm subscribes to the premise that “we must GIVE-to-GET” and the principles have committed themselves to the free dissemination of information and commentary dedicated to educating the public on the risks of investment markets, advisors and financial behaviours. From a small office of 5 employees in Barrie Ontario, Venable Park has succeeded in attracting a North American client base without spending on marketing.
The firm’s primary public communication tool is the daily blog “Juggling Dynamite” which is a continuation of partner Danielle Park’s best-and selling (2007) book of the same name, as well as ongoing speaking and weekly media appearances. With some help from Twitter, the site has become a daily diet for money managers, analysts and investors around world who seek a counter-culture perspective away from mainstream financial media. Juggling Dynamite posts are regularly picked-up by other popular investment blogs such as Seeking Alpha, Calculated Risk, the CFA Institute and others.
Presentation Topics include:
- Everything you post has bias...own it!
- Who can be a Skep-tician and why it matters (the benefits of thinking like Sir Francis Bacon).
- Be the same colour all the way through (your content should reflect who you are).
- The smaller the fractal the bigger the burden (the smaller the trading window, the greater the media and behavioural burden).
- Beware...the media beast you nurture can and will consume you (put a leash on it).
- What I use to make simple yet hopefully useful charts.
- Mistakes I’ve made and others I’ve seen (IMHO).
