MTA Members And Affiliates,

As we rapidly approach the Holiday season, we often reflect on the year just past and think about the year ahead of us. At the MTA Headquarters, we are not different. We look back at this last year as a period of significant and often negative tumultuous change. It was not an easy period for the MTA—personal relationships became strained, process improvements were put into a state of flux and the Association changed many of its leadership positions. However, having worked through our required adjustments, we enter 2007 confident that our active Board, our specific process-change initiatives underway and our strategic vision for the future. Exciting times are ahead for the MTA in 2007 and your Headquarters staff enters 2007 with the enthusiasm and the vision to serve our MTA members and affiliates better than ever before in our history. We will not rest until this is

Nikolai Kondratieff (1892 – 1938) was a Russian economist who postulated that capitalist economies displayed long wave cycles of boom and bust of approximately 60 years’ duration. The Kondratieff wave cycle goes through four distinct phases of inflation (spring), stagflation (summer), disinflation (autumn) and deflation (winter). His study centered on prices and interest rates since the 1700’s, but interestingly, cycles of war, peace, famine and prosperity.

True to K-Wave prediction, deflation last took hold in the 1930’s, and long-term interest rates declined to a cycle low of 2.44% in 1946. Inflation subsequently followed from 1949-1966, then stagflation from 1966-1982. Long-term interest rates finally peaked at 13% in 1981, after rising for thirty-five years.

Disinflation commenced thereafter and continued until 2000, when stock markets topped out worldwide. Now we are in the winter deflation cycle which, according to Kondratieff theory, will be heralded by a general contraction of money, credit and asset prices.

When traders learn about technical analysis, they most often learn how to use indicators and how to read chart patterns in order to enter a trade. The topic of how to exit a winning trade is often ignored and as a result, many traders exit their trades too early or too late, giving up potential profit. Many traders use subjective points, or exit at price targets generated by chart patterns and point and figure charts. Although these are all valid forms of exit, perhaps an approach based on statistical measures would help to improve the timing of when to exit a trade.

The ever popular Bollinger Bands are bands that expand and contract according to a security’s volatility. The bands are placed two standard deviations from the security’s 20 day moving average. Standard deviations measure the dispersion of a set of data from its mean. Two standard deviations from the mean