I wrote a guest post on White Coat Investor arguing that technical analysis is simply creating patterns from random stock movements. I used to be really into analyzing the charts, but after realizing that you can find technical analysis patterns in stock charts created using a random number generator, I think chart-reading is just an exercise in analyzing randomness.
In this era of fake news and alternative facts, I wanted to challenge my readers to a quiz. Let’s see if you can identify real stock charts from stock charts I made up.
In this quiz, there are five real charts and five fake charts. The real charts are actual 1-year charts of well-known S&P 500 companies. The fake charts were randomly generated in an Excel spreadsheet. Can you tell the difference?
I’ll tabulate the results and write a follow-up post (including announcing the top-scoring readers) on May 26, 2017.
(Market data courtesy of Google Finance)
How’d you do? Post your score in the comments below!
I bet I failed this test!
There’s no such thing as “passing” or “failing” with this test. I’ll publish the score distribution next week in a follow-up post.
8 out of 10 at 6am in the morning
Nice job, thevaluedoc. You are currently at the top of the leaderboard.
Does that mean Im the only one who has taken the test so far? Asking for a friend.
You can tell your friend that you are the smartest and most attractive doctor who’s taken the test so far.
Ha. Even I know that isnt true. But there is probably a 1 to 3% chance someone gets a 10 by random chance. So if enogh people take it there will be at least a few 10s. No 9s unless someone made a mistake.
5
I got only 4 correct, being a chemical engineer who generally knows he really is the smartest guy in the room, even in a room of MD’s, imagine my chagrin. OK, that was MD baiting, I’ll admit it. I usually reserve that for my son who is that rarest of people, a chemical engineer who is also an MD.
Medicine certainly does not have a monopoly on the smart people. Many of the smartest people I know are not physicians.
I’m another with only 4 out of 10. Good thing I’m reading your posts! 🙂
I got a 3.
This is a really fun idea, btw.
70%
I got 60% by just picking the charts that had the strongest upward trend as the market was trending up during that period…
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5