There is a prevailing view among researchers and practitioners that
abnormal risk-adjusted returns are an anomaly of financial market
inefficiency. This outlook is misleading, since such returns only shed
light on the imperfect models commonly used to measure and benchmark
investment performance. In particular, using static asset pricing models
to judge the performance of a dynamic investment strategy leads to
flawed inferences when predicting market indicators. Market Timing and
Moving Averages investigates the performance of moving average price
indicators as a tactical asset allocation strategy. Glabadanidis
provides a rationale for analyzing and testing the market timing and
predictive power of any indicator based on past average prices and
trading volume. He argues that certain trading strategies are best
implemented as a dynamic asset allocation without selling short, in turn
achieving the effect of an imperfect at-the-money protective put option.
This work contains an empirical analysis of the performance of various
versions of trading strategies based on simple moving averages.