Some investors aren’t interested in spending hours studying a company’s fundamentals. They look for answers by studying price action and charts. Is there something to technical analysis, or is this age-old practice little more than financial astrology?
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Academics largely see technical analysis as pseudoscientific nonsense. Stock prices are random, says efficient market theorist Burton Malkiel, author of the classic A Random Walk on Wall Street. Investors who rely on technical analysis “will accomplish nothing but increasing substantially the brokerage charges they pay”, he writes.
Legendary investors such as Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch agree. Buffett has said he “realised that technical analysis didn’t work when I turned the chart upside down and didn’t get a different answer”. To Lynch, charts “are great for predicting the past”.
