Technical analysis in the foreign exchange market

This article introduces the subject of technical analysis in the foreign exchange market, with emphasis on its importance for questions of market efficiency. Technicians view their craft, the study of price patterns, as exploiting traders’ psychological regularities. The literature on technical analysis has established that simple technical trading rules on dollar exchange rates provided 15 years of positive, risk-adjusted returns during the 1970s and 80s before those returns were extinguished. More recently, more complex and less studied rules have produced more modest returns for a similar length of time. Conventional explanations that rely on risk adjustment and/or central bank intervention are not plausible justifications for the observed excess returns from following simple technical trading rules. Psychological biases, however, could contribute to the profitability of these rules. We view the observed pattern of excess returns to technical trading rules as being consistent with an adaptive markets view of the world.Foreign exchange rates

Charting an Icarian Flightpath: The Implications of the Qantas Deal Collapse

The failed bid for control of Qantas reveals a multitude of weak points in the governance of management buyouts. The paper situates the Qantas collapse within the context of an increasingly acrimonious global debate over the utility of private equity financing. Regulators in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom have expressed concern that unrestricted expansion increases the risk of market manipulation and macro-economic instability. The paper evaluates whether such concerns are justified by investigating the impact of private equity across a number of critical pressure points within the corporation and between it and those providing the intermediating services required to remain in or exit the public market.private equity, corporate governance, leveraged buyouts

An investigation into the recurring patterns of forex time series data

Countless theories have been developed by both researchers and financial analyst in an attempt to explain the fluctuation of forex price. By obtaining an intimate understanding of the forex market, traders will hopefully be able to forecast and react to forex price oscillations on-the-fly towards making a profitable investment. In this paper, an investigation into the underlying theory that there exists repeating patterns within the time series data which forms the basis of technical analysis is conducted. The assumption that certain patterns do develop over time and the forex market does not fluctuate in a random manner is used to establish the fact that history repeats itself in forex trading. The patterns and repetitions unveiled within the forex historical data would be an important element for forex forecasting