CHAPEL HILL, N.C.  — News flash: The stock market didn’t crash.

Of course, you might not think last week’s impressive strength deserves to be characterized as a “news flash.” Yet it might be if you were following a chart that I featured, which highlighted “eerie” parallels between the recent stock market and its behavior leading up to the 1929 Crash.

Tom McClellan of the McClellan Market Report is one of the prominent investment advisers who was focusing on the 1929 chart analog. As he wrote on Tuesday night of last week, the day my column appeared, the stock market had to stop going higher if that analog were “to keep working. Continuing higher from here would be a break from that pattern, and would constitute evidence that the analog was breaking correlation.”

Over the weekend, McClellan wrote to clients that “it may just be that this whole 1929 analog had ‘jumped the shark’” — at least in part because of the intense publicity the chart had received.

What lessons can we learn? Many of you are taking it as evidence that focusing on things like charts and price patterns is a waste of time.

But that would be premature. No market timing approach works all the time, so last week’s experience does not by itself mean the approach has no value.

In fact, there has been an increasing amount of academic evidence in recent years that technical analysis has genuine merit. That’s noteworthy, because it used to be academic orthodoxy that the approach was absurd and completely worthless.