Foreign Exchange

Technical Analysis in the Foreign Exchange Market

"This paper reports the results of a questionnaire survey, conducted on behalf of the Bank of England, among chief foreign exchange dealers based in London in November 1988. Amongst other findings, it is revealed that at least 90 per cent of respondents place some weight on this form of non-fundamental analysis when forming views at one or more time horizons. There is also a skew towards reliance on technical, as opposed to fundamentalist, analysis at shorter horizons, which becomes steadily reversed as the length of horizon considered is increased. A very high proportion of chief dealers view technical and fundamental analysis as complementary forms of analysis and a substantial proportion suggest that technical advice may be self-fulfilling."
Taylor and Allen (1992)

"Using genetic programming techniques to find technical trading rules, we find strong evidence of economically significant out-of-sample excess returns to those rules for each of six exchange rates, over the period 1981-1995. Further, when the dollar/deutschemark rules are allowed to determine trades in the other markets, there is a significant improvement in performance in all cases, except for the deutschemark/yen. Betas calculated for the returns according to various benchmark portfolios provide no evidence that the returns to these rules are compensation for bearing systematic risk. Bootstrapping results on the dollar/deutschemark indicate that the trading rules are detecting patterns in the data that are not captured by standard statistical models."
Neely, Weller and Dittmar (1996)

"Christopher J. Neely briefly explains the fundamentals of technical analysis and the efficient markets hypothesis as applied to the foreign exchange market, evaluates the profitability of simple trading rules, and reviews recent ideas that might justify extrapolative technical analysis."
Neely (1997)

"This article reconciles an apparent contradiction found by recent research on U.S. intervention in foreign exchange markets. LeBaron (1996) and Szakmary and Mathur (1997) show that extrapolative technical trading rules trade against U.S. foreign exchange intervention and produce excess returns during intervention periods. Leahy (1995) shows that U.S. intervention itself is profitable over long periods of time. In other words, technical trades make excess returns when they take positions contrary to U.S. intervention - U.S. intervention itself is profitable, however. This article will first present recent research on these subjects. Then it will discuss how differing investment horizons and varying returns and position sizes may reconcile these facts."
Neely (1998)

"This article reports the results of a questionnaire survey conducted in February 1995 on the use by foreign exchange dealers in Hong Kong of fundamental and technical analyses to form their forecasts of exchange rate movements. Our findings reveal that>85% of respondents rely on both fundamental and technical analyses for predicting future rate movements at different time horizons. At shorter horizons, there exists a skew towards reliance on technical analysis as opposed to fundamental analysis, but the skew becomes steadily reversed as the length of horizon considered is extended. Technical analysis is considered slightly more useful in forecasting trends than fundamental analysis, but significantly more useful in predicting turning points. Interest rate-related news is found to be a relatively important fundamental factor in exchange rate forecasting, while moving average and/or other trend-following systems are the most useful technical technique."
Lui and Mole (1998)

"There is reliable evidence that simple rules used by traders have some predictive value over the future movement of foreign exchange prices. [...] The results indicate that after removing periods in which the Federal Reserve is active, exchange rate predictability is dramatically reduced."
LeBaron (1994)

Frankel and Froot (1990) report the rising importance of chartists and at what time intervals they extrapolate.

This paper reports the results of a questionnaire survey, conducted on behalf of the Bank of England, among chief foreign exchange dealers based in London in November 1988. Amongst other findings, it is revealed that at least 90 per cent of respondents place some weight on this form of non-fundamental analysis when forming views at one or more time horizons. There is also a skew towards reliance on technical, as opposed to fundamentalist, analysis at shorter horizons, which becomes steadily reversed as the length of horizon considered is increased. A very high proportion of chief dealers view technical and fundamental analysis as complementary forms of analysis and a substantial proportion suggest that technical advice may be self-fulfilling.
Taylor and Allen (2002)

Gencay (1999) shows "that simple technical rules provide significant forecast improvements for the current returns over the random walk model."

"This paper examines the out-of-sample performance of intraday technical trading strategies selected using two methodologies, a genetic program and an optimized linear forecasting model. When realistic transaction costs and trading hours are taken into account, we find no evidence of excess returns to the trading rules derived with either methodology. Thus, our results are consistent with market efficiency. We do, however, find that the trading rules discover some remarkably stable patterns in the data."
Neely and Weller (2001)