March 2000 – We started life with 3 clients; the bank I was working for plus 2 prop rooms.
Our first reports covered Bund, Bobl, Schatz, Euribor, DAX, FTSE and the Mib-30 (It was an Italian bank!).
We steadily added contracts over the next 5 years, things like Gilts, Eurostoxx-50, Short Sterling and the like.
2005 – We started the business 5 years earlier based on the closing of the LIFFE Floor and the fact that LIFFE traders were all now sitting in offices. In 2004/05 talk was that the IPE Floor in London was going to close, which it did in April 2005. We were already writing reports and giving them away on the IPE floor for a few months before this and sure enough we got some sign-ups. These reports covered Brent Crude and Gasoil initially.
2006 – Our reports were picked up by GFI for distribution to their clients in the Oil and Gas space as well as Gold and Silver.
We also teamed up with the Chicago Board of Trade around this time and started writing daily reports for Corn, Wheat and Soybeans.
It was a busy time as far as spreading across the asset classes as we also started producing trading recommendations and commentary for Individual UK Equities, mostly FTSE-100 and FTSE 250 names, with a number of start-up Stock Brokers as clients.
And it didn’t stop there as we also started looking at Forex Majors around this time, focusing on EURUSD, GBPUSD and EURGBP.
The Banking Crisis hit hard and a few of these dropped away in the ensuing years although in 2012 we did re-kindle our association with CBOT, by that time CME Group, focusing on Gold, Silver, Copper, Corn, Wheat, Soybeans, WTI and Henry Hub Gas, then later FX, at one point covering 8 pairs a day.
At the same time the White Label with GFI was getting ever more popular and we were asked to add contracts such as EUA Carbon and the TTF and NBP Gas benchmarks as well as German Baseload Power.
2018 – The GFI collaboration lasted until MiFiD II regulations put a stop to it. This was a blow at the time but turned out to be a blessing (understatement!) and turnover has grown very nicely since as it turned out the GFI reports were very widely read and Energy traders are okay with subscribing to outside reports (unlike the Financial world!).
Present Day – We now have over 100 clients in the Energy space and have added coverage of markets like UKAs and Seasonal Gas, to the already established suite of Brent Crude, WTI, US (Henry Hub) Gas, Dutch TTF, UK NBP, EUA Carbon and German Baseload Power.
I think what this shows is 2 things: It definitely hasn’t been a straight path. There has been uptrends and downtrends in the 26 years of Futurestechs, but it also nods towards the “resilience” of Technical Analysis and our “toolbox” of methodologies, as we have been able to apply pretty much the same principles and methods across a wide range of markets and asset classes.
Clive Lambert FSTA – FuturesTechs
25 years of institutional expertise in the UK and European Energy Markets and 10-time Technical Analysis award winner. Clive provides industry-standard technical outlook, utilising Market Profile and Candlesticks Analysis for over 100 global trading desks.
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