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Article

Is Technical Analysis in the Foreign Exchange Market Profitable? A Genetic Programming Approach

  • Christopher Neely (a1), Paul Weller (a2) and Rob Dittmar (a1)
Abstract

Using genetic programming techniques to find technical trading rules, we find strong evidence of economically significant out-of-sample excess returns to those rules for each of six exchange rates over the period 1981–1995. Further, when the dollar/Deutsche mark rules are allowed to determine trades in the other markets, there is significant improvement in performance in all cases, except for the Deutsche mark/yen. Betas calculated for the returns according to various benchmark portfolios provide no evidence that the returns to these rules are compensation for bearing systematic risk. Bootstrapping results on the dollar/Deutsche mark indicate that the trading rules detect patterns in the data that are not captured by standard statistical models.

Copyright
COPYRIGHT: © School of Business Administration, University of Washington 1997
References
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Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis
  • ISSN: 0022-1090
  • EISSN: 1756-6916
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