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A Mathematical Analysis of Technical Analysis

Mathematical Finance 2019-02-25 v3

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate trading strategies based on exponential moving averages (ExpMAs) of an underlying risky asset. We study both logarithmic utility maximization and long-term growth rate maximization problems and find closed-form solutions when the drift of the underlying is modeled by either an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process or a two-state continuous-time Markov chain. For the case of an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck drift, we carry out several Monte Carlo experiments in order to investigate how the performance of optimal ExpMA strategies is affected by variations in model parameters and by transaction costs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.09476,
  title  = {A Mathematical Analysis of Technical Analysis},
  author = {Matthew Lorig and Zhou Zhou and Bin Zou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.09476},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

29 pages, 0 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:25:58.380Z