"It would be nice to see some scientific proof of sustained...

"It would be nice to see some scientific proof of sustained charting success / methods. I believe there's quite good proof for the "trend is your friend" type of trade. Not sure what else is out there."


There are quite a few scientific studies, which have examined the efficacy of technical trading (and I am talking really sophisticated, adaptive and backtested techniques) and the end result is that no technical strategy has ever succeeded in the equities markets.

There is some evidence that TA strtegies can work in ultra short-term trades (minutes) but not to the extent that you can overcome transaction costs and spreads.

As for 'the trend is your friend', there are no guarantees.
Basically TA techniques fall into two broad categories

(i) momentum based eg trending markets
(ii) mean-reverting markets

The market *can* reward either strategy for a peiod of time,except that the market flip-flops between trending and mean-reverting behaviour *unpredictably* !!!!!

Therefore the 'trend is your friend' until the market decides to give mean-reversion a go, and you can never tell when this will happen.

Finally, there is some evidence that Forex markets tend to be amenable to technical trading, but nobody knows why