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.

Technical traders base their analysis on the premise that the patterns in market prices are assumed to recur in the future, and thus, these patterns can be used for predictive purposes. This paper tests the simplest and most popular trading rules―moving average―in the Chinese stock market. Overall, our results are similar to the ones of Brock et al. (1992) and Lo et al. (2000), providing strong support for the technical strategies. In fact, technical indicators do provide incremental information, and buy signals consistently generate higher returns than sell signals. We also find that the asymmetric phenomenon between the buy and sell signals, and we attributed it to the investors’ behaviors.