Quote from cheeks:
If TA works, it is not just a chink in the armour. It would rip the entire foundation of the efficient Market hypothesis away.
I think that is why they get a little defensive.
COME ON, you guys!

This is getting ridiculous. Read the looooong recent thread on market efficiency for the answers. NO, brokerages DID NOT fund EMH research!

It's not about funding AT ALL. Finance reseach is very different from research say in physics where pretty much all the funding comes from outside. The good thing about being a finance professor is that you are paid well enough to afford researching pretty much want you want.
Cheeks, it IS a chink in the armour. Most of TA you are talking about is very short term. Try moving several billion dollars as you trade your short term strategies... Yes, you can probably make a few thousand here and there if you are smart enough. The key words being "smart enough". The money you will make will just about compensate you for the time/effort/risks.
Only 2 researchers at MIT??
Or shut up! Who's the dude plugging MIT all the time???
Did you just graduate from there or what? B/c it seems those are the only people you know. There are hunderds of publications in the burgeoning behavioral finance field that show why TA <i>might</i>work. Let me guess, the other guy at MIT is Wesley Chan who recently graduated with a PhD from MIT and is now wokring for Andew Lo's recently founded fund b/c he couldn't land a job in academia and Lo was his dissertation chair so he took him in????
Having said that I have to add that YES, there are some potential strategies that can make a lot of money. But I doubt that they are based on pure TA and/or that an average dabbling joe will ever get there.
Read the posts by Traden4Alpha towards the end of the "Efficient Markets Hypothesis..." thread.
He's a lot more eloquent than me (and probably a little less biased

)