Jared Dillian, Columnist

Wall Street’s Technicians Deserve Some Respect

Thanks to advances in computational power, this decade has become the golden age of technical analysis.

October 10, 2018 at 11:00 AM UTC

Jared Dillian is the editor and publisher of the Daily Dirtnap. An investment strategist at Mauldin Economics, he is author of "All the Evil of This World." He may have a stake in the areas he writes about.

Wall Street is increasingly captivated by squiggly lines.
Photographer: Adam Berry/Getty Images Europe

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As a business school student, I took a portfolio management class taught by a professor who didn’t think highly of technical analysis. I don’t recall his exact words, but I think “voodoo” was one of them and how it was all just about “people drawing lines on charts.” He believed in the efficient market hypothesis, which is that market prices always reflect all available information, and the expectation was that we would, too.

I was a bit indignant. I didn’t think it was smart to be dismissive of a technique that seemed to be working for lots of people. After all, isn’t the whole point of learning about finance to find ways to make money?