Simple Moving Average vs Buy and Hold Revisited

Citation:
Câmara, T., and P. Mota. "Simple Moving Average vs Buy and Hold Revisited." (Submitted).

Abstract:

Nowadays, there are still countless researchers defending the effectiveness of the moving average technical analysis and they are able to present evidences for certain stocks, indexes and/or markets where this technical indicator is extremely useful for defining trading strategies. But the contrary also exists, i.e. a lot of researchers show distrust of this technical indicator and also provide evidences with particular stocks, indexes and/or markets where moving averages based strategies do not work well.
Aiming to understand why is it that with some stocks the moving average is indeed an excellent indicator while with others it is not, in this paper we implement moving average based strategies to buy and/or sell stocks for more than 480 companies from the NASDAQ 100, FTSE 100 and SP 500 indexes and compare the results with the ones obtained when using the buy-and-hold strategy.