Technical analysis is an attempt to forecast prices of a financial asset by the study of its past prices. This technique has been an element of financial practice for many decades, but it has not recieved general acceptance in academic literature. In this paper I analyze the effectiveness of certain technical trading rules on the Budapest Stoch Exchange between 1999 and 2005. In the first step I test if there are trading rules that can be qualified as effective when the analysis is applited to the full seven-year period. Some worries arise concerning the long-term analysis, so in the next step I test whether the effectiveness of the trading rules change if the analysis is applied to one-year sub-periods. The results indicate that it is worth implementing the short-term analysis because it shows a different picture of the effectiveness of the trading rules. However, the results of the short-term analysis show that if these trading rules are tested on one-year sub-periods, it becomes doubtful that they are effective.

Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification: G14, G15