The Heretics of Finance: Conversations with Leading Practitioners of Technical Analysis

Chapter 7. Ian McAvity

The market is right. The market will make me wrong and find out where my pain threshold is. It will find out when I will change my opinion. It takes a number of years to learn to be less stubborn.

Ian McAvity started his professional career in 1961 as a banker at the Bank of Montreal. In 1965, he went to Wall Street to work in the research department of Dominick & Dominick, a major brokerage firm, and remained in the brokerage business for ten years. Since 1972, McAvity has been publisher and editor of Deliberations on World Markets, a technical analysis based newsletter that provides charts with commentary. Deliberations offers insights on the major world equity, bond, forex, and precious metals markets and is renowned for its timely and unusual graphic presentations.

McAvity was a founding director in 1983 of Central Fund of Canada, a bullion fund, and of Central GoldTrust (listed on TSX and Amex since 2003). He was written up in leading financial newspapers and magazines, including Barron's and the Wall Street Journal, and was a guest on Wall $treet Week several times in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s, he has opted for a lower public profile, although he has been a featured speaker at investment conferences and technical analyst societies in Canada, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, and South Africa.

During the 1960s, McAvity was a world class squash champion. In 1969, he played on the doubles team that was Canadian ...