Intraday technical analysis of individual stocks on the Tokyo Stock Exchange

This paper conducts an intraday technical analysis of individual stocks listed on the Nikkei 225. In addition to the price-based technical rules popularly examined in the literature, we uniquely propose and statistically investigate technical rules that utilize information regarding (1) the order-flow imbalance and (2) the order-book imbalance. Technical analysis using the imbalance-based trading rules is motivated by the evidence presented first in this paper that short-term returns can be predicted from the information regarding the order-flow and order-book imbalances for more than half of Nikkei 225-listed stocks. However, we demonstrate that no strategies, including limit order trading where trading signals are derived from the order-book imbalance, beat the buy-and-hold strategy within our sample. The results imply that past prices and demand/supply imbalances do not contribute to profiting in intraday trading and that non-execution and picking-off risks are too large for limit order trading to be profitable in our sample. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.