Quote from marketsurfer:
The faithful are grasping at straws and making up sh$t: From my link
......technical analysis cannot earn abnormal returns. Technical strategies are inferior to a buy and hold strategy since they typically churn investor accounts. Nonetheless, technical analysis appears to thrive. The purpose of this paper is to explain why technical analysis survives
even though it is inferior to a buy-and-hold strategy.
Surf, the authors of that piece CLEARLY distinguish between two types of technical analysis, one which works and one which doesn't.
I don't need to make anything up. Here is the quote again:
"There are few sophisticated technical rules that may explain why technical analysis works.
For example, Treynor and Ferguson (JF, 2985) demonstrate the usefulness of past price information in making an abnormal profit. They develop a Bayesian probability estimate using past price data to assess whether the market incorporates some firm-specific information, that is made available to investors. If the market does not have such information, and this is confirmed with past price data, the investor with this private information can make a trading profit.
Technical analysis in the Treynor-Ferguson sense is beyond the scope of this paper, however."
It's "beyond the scope" of the paper because the authors want to focus on the reasons for the survival of the type of TA that does not work.
I can't help it if you don't read your own links.
Notice too, that the kind that does work depends on "private information", which is, as I alluded to earlier, one of the underlying requirements for making "abnormal profits" and can include "private information" in the form of a TA rule-set or an algorithm that captures some essential feature of the market.