Technical Analysis

日期:2015/02/12

Specs. I am trying to write a little something about technical analysis. Here's what I came up with. (by the way the first one to show that random charts and stock market charts look similar was Harry Roberts I think in 1956 or so but Holbrook working may have done it 20 years before). Anyway, how would you improve on what I wrote.

Most traders in the markets use charts and technical analysis to establish and exit their positions. Academicians and skeptics point to the random nature of many technical patterns. Here's a typical chart generated by random numbers. If you don't tell a trader it's randomly generated, they'll come up with all sorts of predictions and patterns that the chart generates. And if you dare to suggest that what they're doing is mumbo jumbo, they take great offense and beat you on the head with examples of great traders who follow charts, and examples of others who consistently make a fortune by using charts.



There's a trader from Harvard who uses charts and has made 20 billion who says "using a chart is like a Dr. taking your temperature before a diagnosis." Another one says that if charts are so useless how come everyone including you looks at it before making a trade. One of the most respected and successful traders, a friend, puts the debate in focus: "There are lots of great tools in technical analysis (some of them in his book like trader's positions, and breakouts, open interest and spreads). They're very useful as part of a bigger trading process. There are good saws and hammers but it takes a good carpenter to make them work."

There's a guy in Japan who calls himself the Japanese Victor Niederhoffer who has turned $ 10,000 into 5 million by using charts. I hope to meet him in Japan when I visit there for a talk arranged by one who believes in charts, an estimable fellow who combines charts with anthropology, life extension and sports, and perhaps I will become the American Matsohita-Masamichi.

Options values are determined by using random numbers with the same standard deviation and distribution of prices as would be generated with the random number generators I just mentioned. Every trader on the floor uses such generators to predict the price that an option should trade at, and they do very well with this model– until something like the 1987 crash occurs and they go broke.

A famous former academic big options trader and head of the exchange said that almost all the scientific options traders he knew found that when you apply the random walk model to options, it turns out that puts are priced much too highly. He said that he's watched every last one of them go broke. The problem here is that extreme events tend to occur much more frequently than the random walk model would predict.

As I write, the Swiss franc recently jumped about 100 standard deviations above its last price in a few minutes, a one in a trillion shot, and billions were lost by option writers who used defective models to place their bets.