Nobody is willing to stick his neck out and declare a global economic recovery is visible, however distantly. Nobody wants to say the U.S. is making the correct policy choices to fix the financial sector, at least enough to get it functioning again. Commentators are at a loss to explain price action, and so they are falling back on what they think is technical analysis. Suddenly people who admit they don’t know much about technical analysis, or who sometimes actively dismiss it, are saying with straight faces the Dow has been above the 55-day moving average for x number of days, or gold is nearing resistance. These remarks are not really a substitute for fundamental analysis, but in the absence of principles and rules on which to base a forecast, technical indicators will have to do.

Long-time technical analysts are of two minds about the apparent new interest in technical analysis. On one hand, it demonstrates a willingness to throw away ideology and focus on the empirical. This is always a good thing, since ideology often blinds one to important truths. Traders lie. Charts do not.

But experienced technicians also know the newcomers trying to use technical tools are not sincere.