The Effectiveness of Technical Trading in the Modern Stock Market

This thesis explores the profitability of various technical trading strategies to explore their ability, generate returns in the American stock market. All strategies are based on five popular technical indicators, including the volume-weighted average price, moving average convergent-divergent index, Bollinger bands, support/resistance, and simple momentum trading. Most strategies were tested from 2019-2022 and tested for the SPY and QQQ stocks, representing the S&P 500 and NASDAQ. 3 of the 26 strategies had win rates of over 50%, but several were able to greatly outperform broader market returns. The best performing strategies were based on simple momentum trading, while the MACD and Bollinger Bands produced the worst results. Some strategies based on simple momentum trading or Bollinger bands found results greatly exceeding standard market returns in recent years, but most do not.