This article presents a comprehensive examination of technical trading rules in the Chinese yuan-based foreign exchange market. The investigation employs daily data spanning seven years for 14 developed and 10 emerging market currencies. The analysis encompasses a vast universe of 41,660 trading rules, representing a significant expansion over the previous studies. The stepwise tests, which was employed to address the data-snooping bias, discover excess profitability in at least half of the developed and emerging currencies, implying the heterogeneous market efficiency across currencies. Our results are robust to sub-sample analysis and different parameter values of the stepwise tests.

It is documented that technical analysis is a highly pervasive activity among stock traders and security analysts in China. This paper uses eight years’ data on daily stock prices and trading volume of thirty-nine companies listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to examine the usefulness of technical analysis. Very weak evidence in support of return predictability is generated either by considering returns alone or by the use of volume in conjunction with returns. The results not only cast doubt on the ability of technical analysis to predict future price movements in China’s stock markets, but also challenge the views of market inefficiency for China that are based on aggregate market data rather than individual company data.