EVIDENCE BASED

Evidence based technical analysis (EBTA) is dedicated to the proposition that technical analysis should be approached in a scientific manner. This implies several things. First, it is restricted to objective methods that can be simulated on historical data. Second, the historical performance statistics produced by such back-testing are then evaluated in a statistically rigorous fashion. In other words, profitable past performance is not taken at face value but rather evaluated in light of the possibility that back-test profits can occur by sheer luck. The problem of lucky performance is especially pronounced when many methods are back-tested and a best method is selected. This activity is called data mining. Though data mining is a promising approach for finding predictive patterns in data produced by largely random complex processes such as financial markets, its findings are upwardly biased. This is the data mining bias. Thus, the profitability of methods discovered by data mining..

Also known as: EBTA