Are moving average trading rules profitable? Evidence from the Mexican stock market

Abstract

This paper tests three moving average technical trading rules for the Mexican Stock Market. Results indicate that moving average rules do indeed have predictive power and can discern recurring-price patterns for profitable trading and support the hypothesis that technical trading rules can outperform the buy-and-hold strategy. Break-even one-way trading costs are estimated to be in the range of 1% to 3% over the period under consideration. These break-even costs, we believe, are large compared to recent estimates of actual trading costs, implying that moving average trading rules have predictive power and can generate consistent profits even after transaction costs are considered.