Technical analysis, trading volume and market efficiency: evidence from an emerging market

Although there is a widespread belief that stock markets are weak-form efficient, technical analysis is a pervasive activity. The extent is examined to which this apparent paradox can be explained by conditioning the past sequence of prices on the past sequence of volume. A unique data set from an emerging market reveals that, for a number of companies in the sample, returns appear to conform to the weak-form version of the efficient markets hypothesis. However, when returns are conditioned on past levels of volume, current returns on over half of these companies exhibit predictability. This is particularly true from companies with low trading volumes.