The Evolution of Technical Analysis Andrew W. Lo Jasmina Hasanhodzic F I N A N C I A L P R E D I C T I O N F R O M BA BY LO N I A N TA B L E T S TO B LO O M B E R G T E R M I N A L S “Where there is a price, there is a market, then analysis, and ultimately a study of the analyses. You don’t want to enter this circle without a copy of this book to guide you through the bazaar and fl ash.” —Dean LeBaron, founder and former chairman of Batterymarch Financial Management, Inc. “The urge to fi nd order in the chaos of market prices is as old as civilization itself. This excellent volume traces the development of the tools and insights of technical analysis over the entire span of human history; beginning with the commodity price and astronomical charts of Mesopotamia, through the Dow Theory of the early twentieth century—which forecast the Crash of 1929—to the analysis of the high-speed electronic marketplace of today. The account is particularly refreshing for academics steeped in statistical models, as technical analysis relies upon a substantially different analytical language: graphs, trends, and complex structures. An excellent overview of an important topic.” —William N. Goetzmann, Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies, Yale School of Management “This book will fascinate anyone interested in technical analysis. Lo and Hasanhodzic are the fi rst to compile this history and they present it with clear, good-humored prose that moves swiftly. And the book has a larger message. By charting the history of organized trading through the millennia—even Babylon!—it points out the timelessness of the human endeavor we presently know as Wall Street.” —Carol Osler, Director, Lemberg Masters Program in International Economics and Finance, Brandeis International Business School, Brandeis University “This book is an exhaustive study of technical analysis history and development from Babylon to the present, another classic by Lo and Hasanhodzic. Using multiple sources, the authors provide a persuasive argument for the origin, rationale, growth, and future of technical analysis. I found the information and logic compelling, and I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the analysis of trading markets.” —Charles D. Kirkpatrick II, CMT, President, Kirkpatrick & Company, Inc., coauthor of Technical Analysis: The Complete Resource for Financial Market Technicians, and Adjunct Professor, Brandeis University The fascinating history of technical analysis and its role in shaping the behavioral theory of modern fi nancial markets. The Evolution of Technical Analysis explores the history of technical analysis from ancient Babylon through the Internet Age, and highlights the successes and failures of the pioneers—the famous and the forgot- ten—who played a pivotal role in the evolution of this fascinating craft. Today, thanks to their contribu- tions, technical analysis has evolved from “voodoo fi nance” into a more scientifi c endeavor, emerging as a respectable discipline that commands the attention of all serious students of fi nancial markets. This sweeping history will surprise skeptics and open the door for more constructive dialogue between techni- cians and proponents of modern fi nance. ANDREW W. LO is the Harris & Harris Group Professor of Finance at MIT Sloan School of Management and the director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering. He has published numerous papers in leading academic and practitioner journals, and his books include The Econometrics of Financial Markets, A Non- Random Walk Down Wall Street, and Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective. His awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Paul A. Samuelson Award, the Graham and Dodd Award, the James R. Vertin Award, and the American Association of Individual Investors Award. He is also Chairman and Chief Investment Strategist of AlphaSimplex Group, LLC. JASMINA HASANHODZIC is a research scientist at Alpha- Simplex Group, LLC, where she develops quantitative investment strategies and benchmarks. She received her PhD from MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her works on alternative market betas and technical analysis have appeared in leading publications, such as the Journal of Investment Management, and she is the coauthor with Andrew Lo of the book The Heretics of Finance. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Market Technicians Association Educational Foundation. Jacket Design: Fleur de Lis Design $29.95 USA / $35.95 CAN “A movement is over when the news is out,” so goes the Wall Street maxim. For thousands of years, tech- nical analysis—marred with common misconcep- tions likening it to gambling or magic and dismissed by many as “voodoo fi nance”—has sought methods for spotting trends in what the market’s done and what it’s going to do. After all, if you don’t learn from history, how can you profi t from it? In The Evolution of Technical Analysis, the director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, Andrew Lo, and coauthor Jasmina Hasanhodzic present an engaging account of the origins and development of this mysterious “black art,” trac- ing its evolution from ancient Babylon to the rise of Wall Street as the world’s fi nancial center. Along the way, the practices of Eastern technical analysts like Munehisa Homma (“the god of the markets”) are compared and contrasted with those of their Western counterparts, such as Humphrey Neill, William Gann, and Charles Dow (“the father of technical analysis”). With deep roots in antiquity, technical analysis is part art and part science, seeking to divine trends, reversals, cycles, and other predictable patterns in historical market prices. While the techniques for capturing such regularities have evolved consider- ably over the centuries, the all-too-human predilec- tion to extrapolate into the future using the past has been a constant driving force throughout history. The authors chronicle the fascinating and un- expected path of charting that likely began with simple superstitions and coincidences, and has de- veloped into widespread practices in many markets and instruments, involving sophisticated computa- tional algorithms and visualization techniques. The Evolution of Technical Analysis is the story of how some early technicians failed miserably, how others succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and what it means for traders today. P R A I S E F O R The Evolution of Technical Analysis Lo Hasanhodzic The Evolution of Technical Analysis FINANCIAL PREDICTION FROM BABYLONIAN TABLETS TO BLOOMBERG TERMINALS Photo: John Melanson Photo: MIT FFIRS.indd iv FFIRS.indd iv 8/9/10 8:56:43 PM 8/9/10 8:56:43 PM The Evolution of Technical Analysis Financial Prediction from Babylonian Tablets to Bloomberg Terminals Andrew W. Lo and Jasmina Hasanhodzic FFIRS.indd i FFIRS.indd i 8/9/10 8:56:42 PM 8/9/10 8:56:42 PM Copyright © 2010 by Andrew W. Lo and Jasmina Hasanhodzic. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifi cally disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fi tness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profi t or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Lo, Andrew W. (Andrew Wen-Chuan) The evolution of technical analysis : fi nancial prediction from Babylonian tablets to Bloomberg terminals / Andrew W. Lo and Jasmina Hasanhodzic. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-57660-349-9 (cloth) 1. Technical analysis (Investment analysis)—History. I. Hasanhodzic, Jasmina, 1979- II. Title. HG4529.L62 2010 332.63'2042—dc22 2010019276 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 FFIRS.indd ii FFIRS.indd ii 8/9/10 8:56:43 PM 8/9/10 8:56:43 PM To our mothers FFIRS.indd iii FFIRS.indd iii 8/9/10 8:56:43 PM 8/9/10 8:56:43 PM FFIRS.indd iv FFIRS.indd iv 8/9/10 8:56:43 PM 8/9/10 8:56:43 PM v Contents Introduction vii Chapter 1: Ancient Roots 1 The Beginnings 2 Ancient Babylon 5 Ancient Greece 11 Ancient Rome 15 Negative Attitudes toward Traders 18 Chapter 2: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance 21 Western Europe 22 Technical Analysis 32 Societal Attitudes 39 Chapter 3: Asia 43 Japan 44 China 49 TOC.indd v TOC.indd v 8/9/10 8:57:46 PM 8/9/10 8:57:46 PM Chapter 4: The New World 59 Wall Street 60 Societal Attitudes 73 Chapter 5: A New Age for Technical Analysis 81 Dow Theory 82 Relative Strength 91 Market Cycles and Waves 92 Chart Patterns 94 Volume of Trading 96 Market Breadth 99 Nontechnical Analysis 99 Chapter 6: Technical Analysis Today 105 Trends 106 Patterns 109 Strength 111 Cycles 112 Wall Street’s Reinterpretation of Technical Analysis 114 Chapter 7: A Brief History of Randomness and Effi cient Markets 131 Prices As Objects of Study 134 The Emergence of Effi cient Markets 137 What Is Random? 141 Chapter 8: Academic Approaches to Technical Analysis 149 Theoretical Underpinnings 150 Empirical Evaluation 151 Adaptive Markets and Technical Analysis 161 Notes 167 Bibliography 191 Acknowledgments 199 About the Authors 203 Index 205 vi C O N T E N T S TOC.indd vi TOC.indd vi 8/9/10 8:57:46 PM 8/9/10 8:57:46 PM vii Introduction Technical analysis — the forecasting of prices based on patterns in past market data — is something of a black sheep in modern economics. Some skeptics view it as kissing cousins with sleazy speculation or gam- bling, while others regard it as a relic that is only slightly more sophis- ticated than the reading of chicken entrails. Proponents of quantitative analysis, who take physics as the ideal model of how economic science ought to look, view technical analysis as antiquated and contrived in its very foundations. They demand mathematical proofs of its validity and dismiss as exception bias the strong betting averages and impressive bottom lines of successful technicians. We make it no secret, then, that we regard technical analysis as a legitimate and useful discipline, tarred by spurious associations and deserving of further academic study. Some of this skepticism is understandable in light of the histori- cal origins (and occasional abuses) of technical analysis. Many of its methods come down to us from the days before computers and the number - crunching - intensive theories they made possible, and not all of its methods have been thoroughly explored within the quantitative frameworks now available. Many terms and concepts in technical analy- sis can seem abstruse or outmoded; it is easy to see how a discipline that FLAST.indd vii FLAST.indd vii 8/9/10 8:57:18 PM 8/9/10 8:57:18 PM viii I N T R O D U C T I O N involves eyeballing charts for patterns with names like “ head and shoul- ders ” and “ cup with a handle ” might seem at fi rst blush more akin to astrology than science. However, many of these are merely heuristics developed in the precomputer age when calculating a simple statistic was a formidable task. For instance, the 10 - day moving average became a fi x- ture of technical analysis not because it was optimal, but because it was trivially easy to compute. Indeed, there are many such concepts in “ classi- cal ” technical analysis that could benefi t from quantitative reformulation. Ultimately, however, both technical and quantitative analysis serve similar purposes: They both attempt to predict the future based on models of the past. One is statistical, the other is intuitive. Whereas a quant minimizes a sum of squared residuals to fi nd the best - fi tting line given the data, a technician estimates it by looking at the charts, searching for tell - tale patterns, and inferring the thoughts and feelings of other market players. Both approaches have merit. This is not to say that they are equal; clearly, quantitative methods have won hands down, dominating the investment industry because of their demon- strable value - added. But technical analysis is surprisingly resilient and persistent, and in some corners of the fi nancial industry — such as the trading of commodities and currencies — it is still the dominant mode of analysis. This state of affairs suggests that technical analysis may have something to contribute, even to the most sophisticated quant. Fortunately, a slow but sure reconciliation is underway. Though big strides have been made throughout history and in recent years toward developing a more systematic approach to tech- nical analysis, technicians remain ostracized to this day. For evidence, look no further than the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ’ s offi cial recognition of the Chartered Market Technician designation, which occurred only in 2005. Part of the reason is that technical anal- ysis is often associated with the speculators, bear raiders, and market cornerers of previous eras. As Tony Tabell, a veteran technical analyst and an heir to the technical brokerage business founded by his father Edmund Tabell in the 1930s, explains: It ’ s hard to visualize unless you ’ ve talked to people who were involved how diffi cult this was in the atmosphere of [the] 1930s and 1940s. The entire brokerage business was a basket case. FLAST.indd viii FLAST.indd viii 8/9/10 8:57:18 PM 8/9/10 8:57:18 PM Introduction ix Volume on the NYSE was under a million shares. This was the 1930s, the Great Depression, nobody had any money, and if they did, they were very leery about investing. Furthermore, technical analysis had been associated with the excesses of the 1920s. All of the various Securities Acts were designed to get rid of the manipulative market operations that had characterized the ’ 20s. Since technical work to a great degree (certainly point and fi gure charts) had been originally conceived as a means of detecting pool operations, confessing that you were involved in technical work at that point was sort of equivalent to confessing that you were some kind of a low - level criminal. I saw some [of ] this, because the remainder of this attitude was still kicking around when I started in the business in the 1950s, but I can imagine how incredible it must have been in the ’ 30s and ’ 40s. 1 The effi cient markets hypothesis (EMH), formulated in the writings of Samuelson (1965) and Fama (1965a,b; 1970), did not help much. 2 According to this theory, there are no patterns in market data that are exploitable through trading strategies. Ever since the advent of mod- ern fi nance — a theory based on rational expectations and market effi - ciency — technical analysis has been dismissed in academic circles as a mathematical impossibility. As Princeton University economist Burton Malkiel concluded in his infl uential book A Random Walk Down Wall Street (1973), “ under scientifi c scrutiny, chart - reading must share a ped- estal with alchemy. ” As we recount the premature obituaries for technical analysis, it is worth noting as an aside that recent research has not only documented departures from the EMH — in the form of cognitive biases such as overconfi dence, overreaction, loss aversion, and herding — but has also included new theoretical underpinnings for technical analysis and the empirical validation of certain technical patterns and indicators. Malkiel ’ s lumping of technical analysis with alchemy is not entirely coincidental, for here we come across another historical reason for the fi eld ’ s questionable reputation — technical analysis was used in conjunc- tion with astrology since the earliest times. The ancient Babylonians would methodically record, often intraday, the prices of various commodities, but they would also assign those same commodities to FLAST.indd ix FLAST.indd ix 8/9/10 8:57:18 PM 8/9/10 8:57:18 PM x I N T R O D U C T I O N the astrological regions of Pisces and Taurus, depending on whether they were bullish or bearish. Similarly, in addition to the very logi- cal lists of weights, measures, and exchange rates recorded in medi- eval merchant manuals, they also often contained lengthy astrological appendixes and advised their readers to buy, sell, or begin anything when they were in the region of Virgo. Yet another example is pro- vided by Christopher Kurz, a sixteenth - century Antwerp trader, who claimed to be able to forecast prices of commodities up to 20 days in advance using his technical trading system based on back - tested astro- logical signals. Such close links between technical analysis and astrology are natu- rally a cause for suspicion and skepticism today. But for our ancestors, astrology was a way of life, applied to wide - ranging areas of human endeavor including warfare and medicine. It was no coincidence that Christopher Kurz doubled as a political astrologer — he is known for having forecasted the extinction of the papacy, among other things — while Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, made meteorological predictions based on movements of the stars and planets. That societies would base their operations in part on astrology sounds absurd today, but interestingly, if we view astrology as a ran- dom number generator of the precomputer age, its prevalence becomes more understandable. Then, as now, forecasting — fi nancial and otherwise — was a business of probabilities. Just as computer - generated random numbers are part of today ’ s statistical forecasting models — for example, the commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for constructing Bayesian forecasts — astrology may be thought of as a ran- dom input in ancient forecasting models. The evolution of technical analysis did not take place in isolation. The growth of markets provided one stimulus for its development. In ancient Babylon, simply writing down commodity prices on clay tab- lets was suffi cient for tracking market action, but with the advent of fi nancial exchanges, the need for visualizing market data became evi- dent. By the 1830s, price charts emerged and soon became so prev- alent that people like William Stanley Jevons and James Wyld made their livelihoods from producing sophisticated charts and selling them to various offi ces. FLAST.indd x FLAST.indd x 8/9/10 8:57:19 PM 8/9/10 8:57:19 PM Introduction xi Speculation provided another stimulus. Though speculation and technical analysis are not synonymous, they do share a certain aware- ness of market psychology and of the forces of supply and demand. It was precisely when speculative techniques were ripe that technical analysis became more concrete, such as on the Dojima Rice Exchange in seventeenth - century Japan, where the legendary trader Munehisa Homma developed the “ candlestick ” charting method to be able to visualize open, high, low, and closing market prices over a certain period, and formulated his version of technical analysis, which remains popular to this day. Despite the distance created by continents and thousands of years, the market wisdom of Charles Dow, the father of modern technical analysis, is astonishingly similar to that of his earliest predecessors, includ- ing the ancient Athenian practice of using price level as an indicator of market sentiment, Homma ’ s rotation of Yang and Yin (bullishness and bearishness), and the emphasis in late imperial China on “ the ulti- mate principle, ” which is that “ when goods become extremely expen- sive, then they must become inexpensive again. ” 3 Such similarities reveal technical analysis as a truly universal phenomenon and highlight how deeply ingrained it is in human psychology to reason in technical terms in order to ride and reinforce the trends, as was the case with the humble tulip bulb during the 1633 – 1637 tulip mania in Amsterdam. As de la Vega put it, “ for on this point we are all alike: when the prices rise, we think that they fl y up high and, when they have risen high, that they will run away from us. ” 4 As long as humans, not robots, make the markets, bubbles and crashes will be a reality. This is an especially important lesson in the wake of the 2007 – 2009 global fi nancial crisis, a time when many fundamentals have crumbled and in some spheres of fi nancial practice there has been nothing left to work with other than technical analysis. In this book, we present a broad, largely nontechnical histori- cal survey of technical analysis, tracing its roots and evolution from ancient times through the medieval and modern eras. While neither of us is a practicing technical analyst or “ technician, ” as they prefer to be called, we have been fascinated by this strange craft for many years, and this volume is the outgrowth of our own attempt to make sense FLAST.indd xi FLAST.indd xi 8/9/10 8:57:19 PM 8/9/10 8:57:19 PM xii I N T R O D U C T I O N of the discipline. As outsiders, we hope to bring a somewhat different perspective that can bridge the gap between academia and the tech- nical analysis community. Our previous book, The Heretics of Finance , contained interviews with leading technicians in which they described their art in their own words. In this volume, we take a more expan- sive view and search for the origins of technical analysis throughout history. This endeavor was more challenging than we anticipated because, in many cases, the historical evidence of technical analysis is indirect, and many ideas were not fully developed by their originators. This is not surprising since, in the past, the concept of technical analysis as a separate discipline did not exist; rather, it was entangled with the intu- itive, sometimes whimsical, and rarely systematic way of buying and selling practiced by speculators, bankers, and merchants. Hence when we say that merchants were the liberators of the independent human spirit and the driving force behind the progress of world civilization, we mean technicians, too. It was they who put an end to solely monas- tic education and the use of Latin in business and private life, and who initiated lay education in the Middle Ages. It is no coincidence that some of history ’ s great scientists were also engaged in investing, their market experiences often motivating their scientifi c contributions (Fibonacci being but one example). Sapori once said that medieval merchants “ traced for individuals and peoples of all times to come the only way that leads to a full realization of humanity. ” 5 We hope this book will convey the same for technical analysts across all eras. FLAST.indd xii FLAST.indd xii 8/9/10 8:57:19 PM 8/9/10 8:57:19 PM 1 A lthough there is no direct evidence of technical analysis from ancient civilizations, scattered indirect evidence can be uncov- ered in early market practices. Bearing in mind that technical analysis is not merely a toolbox of head - and - shoulder - like patterns and MACD - like indicators — as many think of it today — but rather the use of past prices to forecast future ones in the most general sense, we fi nd evidence of it in Babylonian price records, Greek market sentiment assessments, and Roman seasonality patterns. Our predecessors not only followed market prices but also made conscious attempts to measure supply/demand imbalances in price data and react to them for their profi t, often combining their insights with “ data ” from fundamental nature or astrology. It should come as no surprise that in ancient times technical forecasting methods were inextricably linked with and in some cases arose from trading and speculation; hence in this chapter we review them side by side. Chapter 1 Ancient Roots CH001.indd 1 CH001.indd 1 8/11/10 6:35:17 PM 8/11/10 6:35:17 PM