This paper examines the main drawbacks of technical analysis. Although this is widely used by practitioners, from an academic perspective it can only be seen as a form of "voodoo finance". In particular, it runs into the following pitfalls: Subjectivity; Doubtful assumptions; Unjustified...

The empirical literature of stock market predictability mainly suffers from model uncertainty and parameter instability. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel approach that combines the documented merits of diffusion indices, regime-switching models, and forecast combination to predict the...

The volatility specification of the Markov-switching Multifractal (MSM) model is proposed as an alternative mechanism for realized volatility (RV). We estimate the RV-MSM model via Generalized Method of Moments and perform forecasting by means of best linear forecasts derived via the...