[Soxx Clinton]

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Quote:
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The price of the base and related securities (and often, the relationships between them) represents everything that can be known, now.


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If this is true, then technical trading is useless also.

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This is the way I see it as well. Most of the academic data I've seen shows that technical trading actually ends up contributing to market efficiency and that most technical approaches deliver little excess return after transactions costs. In my opinion, I will echo some of the other posters in saying that I think that markets are very long-term efficient, and that the short-term inefficiencies that exist (and these are pretty common from my vantage point as a portfolio manager) have their explanations in the realm of behavioural finance. ie. for example the notion that the market consistently overprices glamor securities and underprices "grittier" investments etc.

I have had a lot of success with value investing in my career because this strategy positions itself to take advantage of the tendency of the market to be long-term efficient while serving up short-term mispricings due to consistent human behavioural traits that tend to irrationality.

That said, there are a small cohort of purely technical traders that are very profitable though statistics suggest that this group is fairly small, ~10% or so.