In the real world, investors believe that they can receive more returns for trading
stocks by utilizing technical analysis. However, due to the seriously worldwide breakout of
COVID-19 from 2020, investors are not sure if they could outperform the market by applying
the technical trading rules during this severe period. Thus, we conduct this study to investigate
the profitability of stock trading with the use of technical indicators under COVID-19 pandemic.
By trading the constituent stocks of Hotel Stock 20 Index (HSI 20) whose stock prices seem
considerably declined after the outbreak of COVID-19, we discover that most of the trading
rules utilized in this study fail to beat the market in the first half of the year 2020. The findings
of this study may shed light on that investors should adopt technical trading rules with care
when stock markets are severely affected by black swan events, such as COVID-19. We argue
that the above issue would be rather impressive not only for market participants to avoid losses,
even make profits, but also for the existing literature due to the rare discussion in the past.
