The use of technical analysis by practitioners in the foreign exchange market contrasts with the ongoing debate among academics on the poor predictive ability of macroeconomic variables. This paper compares these two methods by constructing pools of economic models and technical trading rules and evaluates their in-sample and out-of-sample performance both locally and globally. Results suggest the presence of local forecastability that is overlooked when relying on global measures of predictability. The local predictability is captured using a rolling model selection approach to generate aggregate forecasts across separate pools of economic models and technical trading rules as well as both combined. The out-of-sample results for our aggregate forecasts using pools of economic models fail to beat the random walk as do pools of technical trading models. However combining the two pools of models results in forecasts that beat the random walk for four out of the six sample currencies. This result suggests that exchange rate forecasts can be improved by pooling both sets of models.

外汇市场从业人员对技术分析的使用与学术界关于宏观经济变量预测能力差的持续争论形成鲜明对比。本文通过构建经济模型和技术交易规则池来比较这两种方法，并在本地和全球范围内评估它们的样本内和样本外性能。结果表明，在依赖全球可预测性度量时，当地可预测性的存在被忽略了。使用滚动模型选择方法捕获本地可预测性，以生成跨单独的经济模型和技术交易规则池以及两者结合的总体预测。我们使用经济模型池的总体预测的样本外结果未能像技术交易模型池一样击败随机游走。然而，将这两个模型池结合起来，六种样本货币中有四种的预测结果优于随机游走。这一结果表明，通过合并两组模型可以改进汇率预测。