Scientific article
OA Policy
English

Technical trading revisited: false discoveries,persistence tests, and transaction costs

Published inJournal of financial economics, vol. 106, p. 473-491
Publication date2012
Abstract

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the DJIA index from 1897 to 2011, and use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more outperforming rules which allows diversifying against model uncertainty. Persistence tests show that, even with the more powerful FDR technique, an investor would never have been able to select ex ante the future best-performing rules. Moreover, even in-sample, the performance is completely o set by the introduction of low transaction costs. Overall, our results seriously call into question the economic value of technical trading rules that has been reported for early periods.

Keywords
  • Technical Trading
  • False discovery rate
  • Persistence
  • Transaction costs
Citation (ISO format)
SCAILLET, Olivier, BAJGROWICZ, Pierre. Technical trading revisited: false discoveries,persistence tests, and transaction costs. In: Journal of financial economics, 2012, vol. 106, p. 473–491.
Main files (1)
Article (Accepted version)
accessLevelPublic
Identifiers
  • PID : unige:85618
Journal ISSN0304-405X
604views
701downloads

Technical informations

Creation25/07/2016 15:22:00
First validation25/07/2016 15:22:00
Update time15/03/2023 00:36:00
Status update15/03/2023 00:36:00
Last indexation31/10/2024 04:06:30
All rights reserved by Archive ouverte UNIGE and the University of GenevaunigeBlack