About a dozen times a year, Halkin Services holds a speaker event in London. The interests of our group of mainly financial professions are vast and wide, spanning macroeconomics and credit, global investment strategy and risk, intelligent technical analysis, gold and alternative investments, innovations in technology from biotech to electric vehicles. At a recent Halkin dinner, we invited Robin Griffiths, also a Halkin director, to reflect on his personal journey as an investment strategist and to articulate his key insights of multi-asset investing, shaped by over more than 50 years of experience.

He began with the observation that neither numbers, nor charts are sufficient in themselves: there must be a story! What he didn’t say, but inferred, is that growth is a better story than value. Specifically, he explained the ECU asset technical ranking model, whose recent outputs are shown in figure 1. His main rule for fundamental analysis is that investors should focus on stocks that are part of an index. If it is not in the index, for all practical purposes, it does not exist. Robin uses the 200-day moving average and the position of the current price in relation to it, as his starting point. Robin allocates equities to five categories (Strongest, Strong, Neutral, Weak, and Weakest). Investors should focus on the top 10 stocks. The central idea is to hold the assets for at least three months and not to worry about daily changes in prices during this period.