The Technical Analysis Challenge
by Patrick Burns.
Abstract: We report on a study of the ability of analysts to distinguish an actual price series of an equity from random alternatives. Virtually all of the statistical tests on the results support the hypothesis that no skill was exhibited in selecting the correct response. Many of the analysts were extremely over-confident about their ability to select correct answers. The one area where it seems skill might have been exhibited is in the selection of correct answers that happened to be far from the random choices.