Metashare Feedback

I am taking the trouble to write after reading the article about Metashare in last Saturday's Weekend Herald.

I am a foundation member of Metashare. It was started by Max Lewis and Bruce Barnard in Auckland.

Both are respected technical analysts and came from the Society for Technical Analysts. They are not fly-by-night, quick-buck people at all.

I watched the company grow and develop in terms of the services it offers. Where things went wrong for a while was when a mother and son bought 50 per cent and Bruce Barnard left. They went for high-pressure marketing. Then Metashare went to Australia.

Now that family is out, and a major finance company is a shareholder, and the company is to be floated.

Now about the claims. I have attended many of the seminars and watched very carefully. I tested everything they said and more.

I found Max and the staff to be honest and hard working. They genuinely had the interests of clients at heart. They were careful to ensure people were told exactly what the situation was and the risks. In fact, they were very conservative.

What I found invaluable was their teachings. They used clean financial data from Reuters daily, and use Metastock software. The charts are now on the web for distance learning.

Yes, you can just take their analysis and apply it. But it is not a black box system in the way Colin Nicholson describes.

What they do is run a tested exploration daily and then analyse the shares and categorise them. They give a detailed explanation on a chart and give price targets to buy at if a share breaks north through resistance levels etc. So it is over to the client what he or she does.

They are strong on discipline in trading, and above all they have a trailing stop and a detailed system for getting out when certain conditions are met. If followed, you will lose only half of 1 per cent of your capital if things turn against you.

What it taught me was the basics of technical analysis. I have gone on from there and regard myself as a competent technical analyst.

I still can't fault anything that Metashare teaches. In fact, there is no way in the world I would ever buy a share without applying the analysis that Metashare teaches.

You would be negligent to do so.

If the complainant can't work a computer with the Metashare system, I would suggest there is no hope for them. You need little computer knowledge and they teach you all this as you go.

If the person had gone in to the Auckland office I am sure they would have been given one-on-one tuition. I see some people whom I would describe as nearly backward but after a while are quite competent.

By the way I think it is less than $3000 for Metashare now, but it would need to be checked.

I have recommended it to many and all have been pleased.

The cost is nothing compared with to the risk of share trading without that knowledge and discipline in trading.

So I think the article has put it into the wrong category, and you should correct that. I am often in Auckland, and I would be happy to show you how it works etc. I am sure you will be impressed.

I was sad to see Metashare categorised this way. It is honourable and has integrity.

The very best advice you could give your clients is don't go near the sharemarket without the knowledge and training that Metashare or others can provide.

I hope and request you publish what I am telling you as a response.

Done. Well, sort of. You sent me a much longer message than the normal limit, of 200 words, so I had to edit it.

Perhaps there's room for debate as to whether Metashare is a black box system. I was told that it is by someone familiar with the system, because it contains undisclosed proprietary systems for generating buy and sell signals.

In any case, regardless of how it's labelled, not everyone appreciates Metashare as much as you do.

Read on.

Oh yes, and thanks for your offer to show me how the system works. But I attended a Metashare seminar a few years ago, out of curiosity, and I'm afraid it didn't ring true for me.

You say you would never buy a share without using Metashare techniques. I would never buy one using them.

I, too, was a Metashare subscriber and was led to believe that only 15-30 minutes a day was all that was needed to make heaps of money!

I duly paid the $12,000 and found that I spent hours and hours each day analysing charts and reading the Metashare comments before making purchases.

I lost money trading, due mainly to brokerage costs.

The $12,000 was a bit over the top upon reflection.

You and quite a few others asked how to contact last week's correspondent, in the hope that you, too, might get back the money you spent on Metashare.

Good luck to you all.

You are absolutely right that you will NEVER see effective sharemarket prediction software sold, least of all hustled to the general public.

For many years I've been professionally involved with developing commercial sales forecasting software.

Everyone in this business has a go at the sharemarket from time to time.

It is an obvious way to use predictive software to generate money directly without the tiresome and expensive chore of selling it to people.

It's clear that even a 52 per cent correct strike rate would be enough to give you a great income forever.

But ONLY so long as other people did not also have the same information and thus move the market.

Some may have succeeded, but we'll never know since the situation is the same as finding a huge lump of gold in your backyard, the choice being, "Do I keep this secret and dig up a little gold whenever I want some more money, or do I invite the general public in to help themselves and make a living hiring out spades at $10 per hour?"

Not a hard decision.

Beautifully put.

In your article on Metashare, you mentioned Colin Nicholson.

I wish to correct a part of the letter from your correspondent. Colin is an honorary life member and past president of the Australian Technical Analysts Association and Fellow of the Securities Institute of Australia, where he is principal lecturer in technical analysis.

The article was probably written when Colin was the president of the ATAA. Peter Pontikis is the current president.

We in New Zealand are closely associated with the ATAA (both being members of IFTA, the International Federation of Technical Analysts), but the first "A" in "ATAA" does not stand for "Australasia".

Thanks. I doubt if many of our readers needed to know quite all this detail, but we don't want inaccuracies.

To make sure everything is now present and correct, I emailed your message to Nicholson. He confirmed it, including that he was president of the ATAA when the article was written.

* Mary Holm is a freelance journalist and author of Investing Made Simple. Send questions for her to Money Matters, Business Herald, PO Box 32, Auckland; or e-mail: maryh@pl.net. Letters should not exceed 200 words. We won't publish your name, but please provide it and a (preferably daytime) phone number. Sorry, but Mary cannot answer all questions, correspond directly with readers, or give financial advice outside the column.