I'm writing my master's thesis about stock price prediction using machine learning methods. During my literature review, I noticed that a lot of research produced on this topic is of poor quality, published in non-finance related journals or unpublished/peer reviewed alltogether. There is no paper to be found in leading journals like journal of finance or journal of financial economics on the topic.

I'm curious as to why this is the case. Did the academic world move on, and simply accept that markets are generally efficient a long time ago? Or are the leading journals overlooking a key technique that could effectively forecast stock price?