| Financial Times - 8/6/2001 A
shot of competition
What would improve your online trading returns? Clearly the above cost-savings. But
that still leaves one big source of poor trading performance: picking the wrong stock.
Aimed at professional traders willing to pay £295 monthly, www.thatresearch.com offers
buy and sell signals based on a sophisticated mathematical system. Its systems FTSE
100 performance for April made 15.12 per cent on 15 trades. www.investors-routemap.co.uk
also tests strategies that are likely to outperform. It compares a variety of investment
disciplines including momentum-based and value-based approaches.
Add to this MyBroker's Enigma, and you have an increasing number of sites that are not
only providing buy and sell signals but evaluating how accurate they have been.
Contact Alpesh Patel
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International Investment - June
2001
Identifying sectors that have low correlation with market averages and with one another
is the key to selecting the best performers, according to Nick Dewhirst, chief executive
of Investors RouteMap.
He added; " Volatile markets provide the opportunity to maximise returns from an
active switching policy. Market timing is now in demand but in short supply."
Dewhirst uses a mathematical model that enables investors to choose sectors based on
moving averages and rate changes and economic variables that explain performance.
Sectors currently included in his model are real estate, financial, health care,
growth, value, small cap, technology, resources and gold. Dewhirst added: " These
sectors are stable over time, they are different from each other, and a lot of funds
specialise in these areas. However if performance falls or if a variety of different funds
are launched we will look at other sectors."
Sectors chosen are designed to maximise returns by exploiting systematic divergences in
performance characteristics, rather than risk minimisation.
Dewhirst explained: "In the classic investment cycle different types of shares
rotate in and out of fashion," as seen in the chart.
Economic variables are used to explain the fundamental performance of each sector. The
charts provide a 'best guess' of future trends. Key factors are forecasted from a top-down
perspective so as to avoid the widespread tendency for over-optimism, generated by
aggregating bottom-up estimates.
For example, in times of high inflation, gold, real estate and resources equities do
well. However, Dewhirst points out reality can be more complex.
In some regions economic cycles are typically export led. In such cases capital goods
sectors, such as technology, will typically lead the market, rather than lagging as in the
classic cycle. Also devaluations can often suddenly upset cycles, so there is a sharp
transition from sectors that are interest rate sensitive to those that are economically
sensitive. This has frequently been the case in the UK," he said.
The 'best guesses' suggest what would happen to future share price performance based on
the PIT econometric model, tested over 15-25 years of historic data, which utilises
consensus estimates for GDP, interest rates, wages and prices.
Dewhirst has also added a sector rotation link to his website www.investors-routemap.co.uk. The link
allows investors to objectively assess the outlook for a wide range of stock markets
sectors both globally and by region.
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Investmemt Adviser - 28/5/2001
Strategies for market beating
INVESTORS can now view a wider range of stock market sectors, globally and regionally,
at investors-routemap.co.uk.
The online investment system provides research on investment strategies to beat the
markets.
Nick Dewhirst, chief executive of Investors-routemap.co.uk, said: " We provide
answers to what the best investment game is to play. History shows that there is no right
strategy to beat markets consistently so we research across the board."
"Our service segments global markets by asset class, geography and now also by
equity size, investing style or sector."
The service is based on an integrated model of global markets, which selects funds,
managers or strategies that are likely to outperform.
Subscribers, at a cost of £225 a year a user, can view charts and tables of a monthly
computer-generated set of best guesses on 50 markets and regions comparing key
relationships.
The choice of sectors is designed to maximise returns by exploiting systematic
divergences in performance characteristics. The most significant sectors include real
estate, finance, technology, health care, resources and gold.
Visit www.investors-routemap.co.uk
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Investment Adviser - 6/11/2000
Routemap lends a hand to small IFAs
Investors Routemap, an internet investment service, is offering IFAs analysis on
investment styles and sectors for an annual fee.
Investors Routemap said the service was designed to help IFAs cut through a "sea
of data" and offer clients objective opinions on the prospects for fund's investment
strategies.
Nick Dewhirst, the founder of Investors Routemap, which is authorised by the SFA, was
previously a stockbroker. He said his analysis of raw data was designed "to help IFAs
select the fund rather than the manager. He can earn an ongoing fee from advising on
that."
The style and sector analysis is the latest addition, which currently includes research
on bonds, currencies and stockmarkets in 50 countries. It coincides with the launch last
month of new funds from fund management firms that propelled style investing in pure
growth or value stocks back into the limelight.
Mr. Dewhirst said his target audience was financial intermediaries who lacked the
economies of scale to carry out extensive investment strategy analysis in-house.
He said: "If you are a large investor, you have all the electronic data you could
possibly want. But the small IFA does not have the time to look for it. The IFA is lacking
a service to decide which investment games he should be playing."
Mr. Dewhirst said, following the FSA's decision to exclude past performance [from its
league tables], IFAs were confused about how to advise. "They feel they have to put
everybody into managed funds even if they have better ideas. The idea is to give them an
objective third-party source of information."
The service is subscription-only. It costs £300 for the equity-only research and an
extra £150 for the style module. Rates can be negotiated for a group of IFAs.
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International
Investment - September 2000
Staying on top of emerging market risk
After several years in the doldrums, fund managers are once again turning a serious eye
to emerging markets. But at what price? In an analysis of emerging market debt in this
issue, page 14, some funds have managed to post strong annualised mean returns but the
price is high annualised standard deviation levels.
One of the main problems for emerging market funds is the shortage of reliable
information needed to assess emerging market risk, a factor that has resulted in many
managers bombing out
.This focus on quality of information is also behind the development of
another internet initiative, Professional Investment Tools (www.investors-routemap.co.uk),
set up by Nick Dewhirst, ex Kleinwort's. Dewhirst uses a proprietary method of quantifying
volatility in markets - both developed and emerging - to assess whether a market is cheap
or expensive. Dewhirst subscribes to the view that risk is not about whether a market is
good or bad, but rather a question of valuation.
Dewhirst excludes any country where inflation levels are above 20% which is his
benchmark for when serious sums of money are likely to flow into the market. On this basis
Russia, China and Turkey are currently excluded from rankings. He uses four valuations to
assess a market's value. Using quantitative methods comparing 20 year's of data focusing
on p/e ratios, bond yields, interest rates, market capitalisation and GDP, Dewhirst then
calculates the average of all four valuations and ranks markets accordingly. On this
criteria, the top five cheapest markets are Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Japan and Malaysia
while the most expensive (emerging markets) are Portugal, Chile and India. What is more
interesting for investors is that while the price of investing in emerging markets may
always entail higher risks, recent developments go some way to ensuring it need not be so
risky in future.
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