Whether driven by mass psychology, fear or greed of investors, the forces of supply and demand, or a combination, technical analysis has flourished for thousands of years on the outskirts of the financial establishment. In The Evolution of Technical Analysis: Financial Prediction from Babylonian Tablets to Bloomberg Terminals, MIT's Andrew W. Lo details how the charting of past stock prices for the purpose of identifying trends, patterns, strength, and cycles within market data has allowed traders to make informed investment decisions based in logic, rather than on luck.

In Far from Random, Richard Lehman uses behavior-based trend analysis to debunk Malkiel's random walk theory. Lehman demonstrates that the market has discernible trends that are foreseeable. By learning to spot these trends, investors and traders can predict market movement to boost returns in anything from equities to 401(k) accounts.