Analysis
Alfred Cowles in a study in Econometrica in 1934 showed that trading based upon the editorial advice would have resulted in earning less than a buy-and-hold strategy using a well diversified portfolio. Cowles concluded that a buy-and-hold strategy produced 15.5% annualized returns from 1902–1929 while the Dow theory strategy produced annualized returns of 12%.
After numerous studies supported Cowles over the following years, many academics stopped studying Dow theory believing Cowles's results were conclusive. In recent years however, Cowles' conclusions have been revisited. William Goetzmann, Stephen Brown, and Alok Kumar believe that Cowles' study was incomplete and that Dow theory produces excess risk-adjusted returns. Specifically, the return of a buy-and-hold strategy was higher than that of a Dow theory portfolio by 2%, but the riskiness and volatility of the Dow theory portfolio was lower, so that the Dow theory portfolio produced higher risk-adjusted returns according to their study.
On the 160th anniversary of Charles Dow's Birthday, Jack Schannep of TheDowTheory.com, delivered a speech to the Market Technicians Association, describing recent contributions to the Evolution of the Dow Theory and showed that traditional Dow Theory gives a total annualized return, from 1953 until 2011, about 1.5% per year greater than Buy and Hold.
Many technical analysts consider Dow Theory's definition of a trend and its insistence on studying price action as the main premises of modern technical analysis.
Read more about this topic: Dow Theory
Famous quotes containing the word analysis:
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)