I’ve said before that I think TA is astrology, and I still haven’t seen any evidence to rid me of that belief. I’ve thought about genuine scientific experiments that could be done to see if it’s true and I’m wondering if people have already done them.

See if TA-knowers all move the same way by giving a bunch of them a chart and have them predict the forward movement of the stock based on that chart. Two key ways you know astrology/fortune telling is fake are 1. that it uses weasel-words and vagueness to make predictions, and 2. because the same data can cause its practitioners to make wildly different predictions. In actual science however, any two scientists should be able to take the same data and make the same prediction: if two bowling balls of different weights are dropped from the Eiffel Tower, which hits the ground first? Any physicist can tell you the answer. Now to be clear, second opinions in medicine do exist, but these occur because we often work with incomplete information and have to use priors and estimations for the rest. But TA claims that the chart is the information, so if the information is complete than the prediction should always be the same. So if 100 TA-knowers all make the same prediction using the same chart, then perhaps we can start treating this as a complete and testable theory. If they all draw different lines on it then it becomes more clear we’re dealing with astrology.

Find out if the TA of ETFs follow the TA of their underlying assets. The mechanisms of ETFs ensures that their price never deviates far from the price of their underlying assets, and if both ETFs and the securities they contain obey TA then the movement of the two should correlate. Essentially you should be able to make predictions of the movement of an ETF by performing TA on the stocks that compose it, and I’d like to know if this is true.

Correlation analysis. Most theories of the stock market claim that the movement of a stock price is uncorrelated with any of it’s previous prices. Just because a stock is down 50% doesn’t mean it’s dead or a bargain. If I’m going to believe TA I’d like a TA-believer to prove to me that price movement is correlated with previous prices.

A working, mathematical definition of “resistance” and “support.” I understand that these are TA terms, but I’ve asked 5 different TA people for a true definition of them and have gotten 5 different answers. If TA really is based on math then these terms need to be mathematically defined, not emotionally defined based on how someone wants to analyze a chart at that time.

These are just a few of the things I’d like to be demonstrated before I start believing in TA.