Are random trading strategies more successful than technical ones? (2013)

> Our main result, which is independent of the market considered, is that standard trading strategies and their algorithms, based on the past history of the time series, although have occa- sionally the chance to be successful inside small temporal windows, on a large temporal scale perform on average not better than the purely random strategy, which, on the other hand, is also much less volatile. In this respect, for the individual trader, a purely random strategy represents a costless alternative to expensive professional financial consulting, being at the same time also much less risky, if compared to the other trading strategies.

The reference to "expensive professional consulting" doesn't make sense to me, because that wasn't a studied strategy. The non-random strategies that the study compared with were all deterministic rules based on technical indicators.

It's still interesting that those rules didn't do better than random while having higher volatility.