Main article: Candlestick pattern. Technical analysis.
Breakout Dead cat bounce Dow theory Elliott wave principle Market trend. Hikkake pattern Morning star Three black crows Three white soldiers. Average directional index A. Coppock curve Ulcer index. With the advent of computers, backtesting can be performed on entire exchanges over decades of historic data in very short amounts of time. The use of computers does have its drawbacks, being limited to algorithms that a computer can perform.
Technical analysis. Download as PDF Printable version. Being densely packed with information, it tends to represent trading patterns over short periods of time, often a few days or a few trading sessions. Buzzingstock Publishing House. March Learn how and when to remove this template message. Below is a list of the most commonly used traditional chart patterns:. Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata Articles needing additional references from July All articles needing additional references All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from October Articles with unsourced statements from March Articles needing additional references from March Commons category link is locally defined.
Several trading strategies rely on human interpretation, [41] and are unsuitable for computer processing. John Murphy states that the principal sources of information available to technicians are price, volume and open interest. However, many technical analysts reach outside pure technical analysis, combining other market forecast methods with their technical work. One advocate for this approach is John Bollinger , who coined the term rational analysis in the middle s for the intersection of technical analysis and fundamental analysis.
Technical analysis is also often combined with quantitative analysis and economics.
For example, neural networks may be used to help identify intermarket relationships. Investor and newsletter polls, and magazine cover sentiment indicators, are also used by technical analysts. Whether technical analysis actually works is a matter of controversy. Methods vary greatly, and different technical analysts can sometimes make contradictory predictions from the same data. Many investors claim that they experience positive returns, but academic appraisals often find that it has little predictive power.
Technical trading strategies were found to be effective in the Chinese marketplace by a recent study that states, "Finally, we find significant positive returns on buy trades generated by the contrarian version of the moving-average crossover rule, the channel breakout rule, and the Bollinger band trading rule, after accounting for transaction costs of 0. An influential study by Brock et al. Subsequently, a comprehensive study of the question by Amsterdam economist Gerwin Griffioen concludes that: "for the U.
Moreover, for sufficiently high transaction costs it is found, by estimating CAPMs , that technical trading shows no statistically significant risk-corrected out-of-sample forecasting power for almost all of the stock market indices. In a paper published in the Journal of Finance , Dr. Andrew W. Technical analysis, also known as "charting", has been a part of financial practice for many decades, but this discipline has not received the same level of academic scrutiny and acceptance as more traditional approaches such as fundamental analysis.
One of the main obstacles is the highly subjective nature of technical analysis — the presence of geometric shapes in historical price charts is often in the eyes of the beholder. In this paper, we propose a systematic and automatic approach to technical pattern recognition using nonparametric kernel regression , and apply this method to a large number of U. By comparing the unconditional empirical distribution of daily stock returns to the conditional distribution — conditioned on specific technical indicators such as head-and-shoulders or double-bottoms — we find that over the year sample period, several technical indicators do provide incremental information and may have some practical value.
In that same paper Dr. Lo wrote that "several academic studies suggest that The efficient-market hypothesis EMH contradicts the basic tenets of technical analysis by stating that past prices cannot be used to profitably predict future prices. Thus it holds that technical analysis cannot be effective. Economist Eugene Fama published the seminal paper on the EMH in the Journal of Finance in , and said "In short, the evidence in support of the efficient markets model is extensive, and somewhat uniquely in economics contradictory evidence is sparse. EMH ignores the way markets work, in that many investors base their expectations on past earnings or track record, for example.
Because future stock prices can be strongly influenced by investor expectations, technicians claim it only follows that past prices influence future prices. Technicians have long said that irrational human behavior influences stock prices, and that this behavior leads to predictable outcomes. By considering the impact of emotions, cognitive errors, irrational preferences, and the dynamics of group behavior, behavioral finance offers succinct explanations of excess market volatility as well as the excess returns earned by stale information strategies EMH advocates reply that while individual market participants do not always act rationally or have complete information , their aggregate decisions balance each other, resulting in a rational outcome optimists who buy stock and bid the price higher are countered by pessimists who sell their stock, which keeps the price in equilibrium.
The random walk hypothesis may be derived from the weak-form efficient markets hypothesis, which is based on the assumption that market participants take full account of any information contained in past price movements but not necessarily other public information. In his book A Random Walk Down Wall Street , Princeton economist Burton Malkiel said that technical forecasting tools such as pattern analysis must ultimately be self-defeating: "The problem is that once such a regularity is known to market participants, people will act in such a way that prevents it from happening in the future.
Malkiel has compared technical analysis to " astrology ". In the late s, professors Andrew Lo and Craig McKinlay published a paper which cast doubt on the random walk hypothesis. In a response to Malkiel, Lo and McKinlay collected empirical papers that questioned the hypothesis' applicability [58] that suggested a non-random and possibly predictive component to stock price movement, though they were careful to point out that rejecting random walk does not necessarily invalidate EMH, which is an entirely separate concept from RWH. In a paper, Andrew Lo back-analyzed data from the U. Technicians say [ who?
The random walk index RWI is a technical indicator that attempts to determine if a stock's price movement is random in nature or a result of a statistically significant trend. The random walk index attempts to determine when the market is in a strong uptrend or downtrend by measuring price ranges over N and how it differs from what would be expected by a random walk randomly going up or down.
The greater the range suggests a stronger trend. Applying Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory to price movements, Paul V. Azzopardi provided a possible explanation why fear makes prices fall sharply while greed pushes up prices gradually. By gauging greed and fear in the market, [63] investors can better formulate long and short portfolio stances. Caginalp and Balenovich in [64] used their asset-flow differential equations model to show that the major patterns of technical analysis could be generated with some basic assumptions.
Some of the patterns such as a triangle continuation or reversal pattern can be generated with the assumption of two distinct groups of investors with different assessments of valuation. The major assumptions of the models are that the finiteness of assets and the use of trend as well as valuation in decision making. Many of the patterns follow as mathematically logical consequences of these assumptions. One of the problems with conventional technical analysis has been the difficulty of specifying the patterns in a manner that permits objective testing.
Japanese candlestick patterns involve patterns of a few days that are within an uptrend or downtrend. Caginalp and Laurent [65] were the first to perform a successful large scale test of patterns. A mathematically precise set of criteria were tested by first using a definition of a short-term trend by smoothing the data and allowing for one deviation in the smoothed trend.
A candlestick chart is a style of financial chart used to describe price movements of a security, derivative, or currency. Each "candlestick" typically shows one day,. A hammer is a type of bullish reversal candlestick pattern, made up of just one candle, found in price charts of financial assets. The candle looks like a hammer,.
They then considered eight major three-day candlestick reversal patterns in a non-parametric manner and defined the patterns as a set of inequalities. Among the most basic ideas of conventional technical analysis is that a trend, once established, tends to continue. However, testing for this trend has often led researchers to conclude that stocks are a random walk.
One study, performed by Poterba and Summers, [66] found a small trend effect that was too small to be of trading value. As Fisher Black noted, [67] "noise" in trading price data makes it difficult to test hypotheses. One method for avoiding this noise was discovered in by Caginalp and Constantine [68] who used a ratio of two essentially identical closed-end funds to eliminate any changes in valuation.
A closed-end fund unlike an open-end fund trades independently of its net asset value and its shares cannot be redeemed, but only traded among investors as any other stock on the exchanges. In this study, the authors found that the best estimate of tomorrow's price is not yesterday's price as the efficient-market hypothesis would indicate , nor is it the pure momentum price namely, the same relative price change from yesterday to today continues from today to tomorrow.
But rather it is almost exactly halfway between the two. Starting from the characterization of the past time evolution of market prices in terms of price velocity and price acceleration, an attempt towards a general framework for technical analysis has been developed, with the goal of establishing a principled classification of the possible patterns characterizing the deviation or defects from the random walk market state and its time translational invariant properties.
Trend-following and contrarian patterns are found to coexist and depend on the dimensionless time horizon. Using a renormalisation group approach, the probabilistic based scenario approach exhibits statistically significant predictive power in essentially all tested market phases.
A survey of modern studies by Park and Irwin [70] showed that most found a positive result from technical analysis. In , Caginalp and DeSantis [71] have used large data sets of closed-end funds, where comparison with valuation is possible, in order to determine quantitatively whether key aspects of technical analysis such as trend and resistance have scientific validity. Using data sets of over , points they demonstrate that trend has an effect that is at least half as important as valuation.
The effects of volume and volatility, which are smaller, are also evident and statistically significant. An important aspect of their work involves the nonlinear effect of trend. Positive trends that occur within approximately 3. For stronger uptrends, there is a negative effect on returns, suggesting that profit taking occurs as the magnitude of the uptrend increases. For downtrends the situation is similar except that the "buying on dips" does not take place until the downtrend is a 4.
These methods can be used to examine investor behavior and compare the underlying strategies among different asset classes. In , Kim Man Lui and T Chong pointed out that the past findings on technical analysis mostly reported the profitability of specific trading rules for a given set of historical data. These past studies had not taken the human trader into consideration as no real-world trader would mechanically adopt signals from any technical analysis method.
Therefore, to unveil the truth of technical analysis, we should get back to understand the performance between experienced and novice traders. If the market really walks randomly, there will be no difference between these two kinds of traders.
However, it is found by experiment that traders who are more knowledgeable on technical analysis significantly outperform those who are less knowledgeable. Until the mids, tape reading was a popular form of technical analysis. Keeping an eye on the volume can help to find the clue between measuring gap and exhaustion gap.
Normally, noticeable heavy volume accompanies the arrival of exhaustion gap. Some market speculators "Fade" the gap on the opening of a market. A "downgap" would mean today opens at, for example, , and the speculator buys the market at the open expecting the "downgap to close". Once the probability of "gap fill" on any given day or technical position is established, then the best setups for this trade can be identified. Some days have such a low probability of the gap filling that speculators will trade in the direction of the gap.