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Ideas Farm: High watermarks matter

An awareness of market psychology might be useful, if not pivotal, to investor timing decisions
April 13, 2022
  • There are good reasons to doubt charting
  • Recent studies suggest 52-week highs matter
  • Lots of idea-generating content

The world of charting – or in the glossy term of its adherents, ‘technical analysis’ – has the hallmarks of a pseudo-science.

On the one hand, the idea that you can predict which way a security will move using only current and historic price data feels nonsensical. Markets might not always be efficient, but it is still useful to see them as investors’ best estimate of the price they are willing to pay for a risk-adjusted return.

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