Charting or technical analysis is the use of numerical series generated by market activity, such as price and volume, to predict future trends in that market. The techniques can be applied to any market with a comprehensive price history. Technical analysis does not try to analyze the financial data of a company such as cashflow, dividends and projection of future dividends. That type of analysis is called fundamental analysis.
While technical analysis is widely used (if only as one input among many) by both professional and amateur traders as a means of predicting future market moves, it is generally not used by economists in any academic sense.
Technical analysis implicitly rejects the efficiency of the market as understood in the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). (That is, using technical analysis on a particular market implicitly assumes that that market is not efficient, as defined by EMH.) The efficient markets theories basically argue that existing prices reflect all available information, and that future price movements will follow a path that will approximate to a random walk (Brownian motion) as they adjust to new information as it emerges. The theories further assume that all participants in the stock market have equal and instantaneous access to all information that might affect stocks. Technical analysts or chartists believe that by analysing stock price histories they can discern sufficient information about the thinking of buyers and sellers to anticipate future events. That is, they assume that there is useful information to be gleaned, i.e. hidden within, price histories; that it is a way of analyzing the past actions of people in a particular market as reflected by their actual transactions. As the assumption of an efficient market is central to almost all option pricing theory, financial mathematicians working in the area of derivatives generally reject technical analysis as unscientific. All large banks, however, employ both technical analysts and financial mathematicians.
The traditional chartists developed familiarity with chart patterns that seemed to recur repeatedly and gave some of them names e.g. "head and shoulders" or "flag" or "triangle". They believed that they could infer probabilities of price action from studying the patterns. More recent technical analysts use a wide variety of techniques but, at their best, their methods approximate more closely to a statistical analysis of price action. For example J.M.Hurst (see below) used sophisticated techniques (Fourier analysis) to search for meaningful signals amongst the apparent random noise of stock price movements. The most sophisticated technical analysis software allows the user to design indicators and to optimise them by testing their profitability (assuming trading rules and transactions costs) using historic data; trading stratagems can be designed that utilise one or more such indicators.
Some of the techniques used and patterns found include:
Techniques of Technical Analysts
Charting Terms
See Also:
Finding related topics
Further reading