Interview  |  DEC 1997

On the Fundamentals of Technical Analysis Andrew Lo by Thom Hartle

Andrew Lo, Harris & Harris Group Professor of Finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Sloan School of Management, director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering and founder of Sloan's Track in Financial Engineering, is a radical of sorts because of his frank and open interest in technical analysis. Further, he's an academic who's perfectly willing to admit that technicians are often more open-minded about the markets than the academics who are his peers. But he'll also tell you that technicians are getting too far away from the fundamentals of technical analysis, and getting overly enamored with the modern bells and whistles. To find out what else Lo had to say, Stocks & Commodities Editor Thom Hartle spoke with him via telephone on September 22, 1997, discussing technical analysis of yore, why statistics are misapplied and how artificial intelligence may not be the great end-all that it's proclaimed to be. By Thom Hartle

by Thom Hartle