If you’re looking for a system that objectively identifies current and potential investment market leaders across a broad range of sectors to enhance your investment and asset-allocation decisions, you might want to consider SIACharts.

Using technical analysis, this online tool compares five asset classes — cash, bonds, equities, commodities and currencies — to identify the leading asset class. You may find the website (www.siacharts.com) useful, whether your focus is on stocks, exchange-traded funds, mutual funds or futures.

Says Jeremy Fehr, president and founder of Fund Charts Inc., the Calgary-based firm that developed and has consistently modified the SIACharts software over the past 11 years: “SIACharts allows investment advisors and portfolio managers to complement their fundamental perspective with a quantitative view, backed by solid technical analysis.”

Put simply, technical analysis attempts to understand the emotions in the investment market by studying the market itself, as opposed to its components. Fundamental analysis, on the other hand, focuses on the underlying factors that affect a company, sector or the economy as a whole, in an attempt to forecast its future prospects.

“The vast majority of SIA’s current clients are focused on fundamental analysis,” says Fehr, “but have come to appreciate the value of a technical analysis tool that identifies when their fundamentally sound investments are poised to become market leaders. This allows [users] to build better portfolios that can deliver positive results for their clients.”

The key feature of this proprietary software is its daily comparative reports, which rank the relative strength of various asset classes and individual investments. You also can get more in-depth analysis at the submarket or subsector level. For instance, you can compare large-, mid- and small-cap equities with each other; emerging markets with developed markets; long-, medium- and short-term bonds; value vs growth styles; gold vs silver; and staples vs discretionary — as well as make comparisons in several other sectors and subsectors.

Or you can drill down deeper to the level of actual investments by using the software to construct your own comparative analysis reports using the standard SIA reports.

“Our process is logical,” Fehr says. “If you decide that you need a large-cap Canadian equity to balance a portfolio, you can simply click on SIA’s ‘Large-Cap Canadian Equity Report’ to get a ranking of the investments in the sector.”

Sector-specific reports

As well, you can benefit from a number of sector-specific reports to aid your investment decisions. For example, if you believe that the Canadian energy sector is poised to outperform and want to overweight the sector, you can use the “SIA S&P/TSX Capped Energy Comparative Report” to compare and rank each stock in that sector to determine the strongest potential picks. Typically, investments that are favoured remain in the “favoured zone” for six to 18 months.

You also can use SIACharts to construct proprietary model portfolios, monitor the performance of those portfolios through the software’s “tracking report” features and compare their performance to that of other portfolios. This can be a useful prospecting tool that enables you to present best-case scenarios to prospective clients.

The website also supports asset-allocation decisions. For example, by using the “relative strength” features of SIACharts, you can identify weaknesses in a prospect’s existing portfolio and make technically sound recommendations for a new portfolio that potentially can perform better.

You can also overlay the “technical analysis” filter of SIACharts on a defined portfolio of fundamentally selected securities to enhance your investment decisions. Essentially, your decisions will be supported by both fundamental and technical analysis, which can provide a competitive advantage over financial advisors who use only fundamentally selected portfolios.

The reports generated by the software can be tailored to suit specific clients.

The SIACharts website also provides up-to-date market statistics and alerts, news feeds, index and selected individual stock returns, historical charts and various charting tools.

The password-protected site offers a free trial, which can be requested by email. The fee for an individual user is $300 per month; a team costs $450 per month.

Fund Charts offers comprehensive training and technical support to new SIACharts users — who, the firm claims, can become proficient in as few as two sessions. IE