Fooled by Technical Analysis: The Perils of Charting, Backtesting, and Data-Mining

This book goes beyond my earlier works, exploring the myths and traps of technical analysis as well as the factors influencing trading profitability, including strategies for addressing these issues. Anyone who has attempted to trade using a system or a technical method, in automated or discretionary mode, will find the material invaluable. More importantly, traders who continue using naïve technical analysis methods may get valuable hints as to why their approach to trading the markets fails or even the reasons that temporary positive results can be mostly attributed to luck. In this book, I also deal with some widely held misconceptions about trading system development; for example, one of them is that out-of-sample testing validation suffices for developing robust systems or that statistical hypothesis testing can be applied to trading system development. I believe that such misconceptions have contributed to trader failures, and I present specific alternatives for dealing with their limitations.