Profitability Evaluation of Major Technical Analysis Trading Strategies Applied to the S&P 500 from 2005 to 2023

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2024 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1.0, Reutlingen University, language: English, abstract: This thesis will examine how the efficient market hypothesis (Fama, 1965), the random-walk hypothesis, and the Martingale model relate to the profitability of technical analysis. Additionally, relevant research on profitability up to 2023 will be presented and summarized, highlighting major findings in the context of profitability following technical trading rules. The contribution to current research is made by testing the profitability of popular technical analysis strategies and discussing the underlying reasons for any observed profitability. Furthermore, a separate analysis will be conducted, applying four technical analysis strategies to the S&P 500 time series from 2005 to 2023. This thesis shows that none of the, in selected literature deemed profitable, trading strategies applied by Marshall (2017), Kuang et al. (2014), and Brock et al. (1992) are outperforming a S&P 500 buy-and-hold strategy between 2005 and 2023. Robustness checks such as break-even transaction cost analysis show that only two moving average variation strategies are profitable at the 20 basis points transaction cost level. Neglecting this influence of transaction costs, only one of these strategies’ returns are greater than those of a buy-and-hold strategy, though still of unsignificant nature. Nevertheless, technical analysis strategies exhibit superior performance in terms of Sharpe ratio compared to the buy-and-hold approach. This is primarily due to this thesis’ assumption of investing in risk-free treasury bills when not allocated to the S&P 500 index.