How do you know these hypothetical people exist? Aside from skill decline with aging and the evolution of the markets the longer a day trader day trades the greater their risk of ruin is by the nature of the concept, unless they are constantly improving their day trading, which is impossible for a discretionary trader trading against evolving algorithms. Is Paul Tudor Jones currently surpassing his winnings in the currency and index futures from the late '80s now?
Please explain to me how a discretionary trader is 'trading against evolving algorithms'? The markets go up and the markets go down. What's preventing you from buying the day low and selling the day high? Are the charts from today and back then really that different? The death of (day) trading would be if volatility ceased to exist. As long as there's volatility, there's opportunity. IMO...
Institutional computer programs make up 85% or more of the volume and thus price direction of stock and future markets, HFT, makes up around 50% of volume (more on futures) in these markets. Has Paul Tudor Jones aced a Top Step Trader combine?
I remember a website which tried to find charts from the past which were almost identical to the current pattern in process I guess in anticipation of the current pattern doing the same thing again (based on people always claiming that the markets just repeat themselves again and again)
I have found an interesting study. See here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2648292
You got it sir. If there something in TA that works, it only works until it gets mainstream. There's a lot of bogus in TA, but some patterns are telling a story. Forecasting future prices based on history data is not impossible, it's just not possible ALL the time.
There is a contradictipon in what you post. You don't know any successful TA trader, but you know: "Aside from skill decline with aging and the evolution of the markets the longer a day trader day trades the greater their risk of ruin is by the nature of the concept, unless they are constantly improving their day trading, which is impossible for a discretionary trader trading against evolving algorithms." How can you know this if you don't know any TA trader? How do you know their system? I understand: you post hypothetical because these traders are also hypothetical according to you. This means that the problem you describe is hypothetical too. So all this has nothing to do with real traders.
If price is at a low he doesn't buy because it's going down. If it's high he doesn't sell because it's going up. Almost everyone follows intuitive logic.
If you're one of the big traders/investors that can push price around and you want price to go up because you're accumulating a long position and as price goes up you want price to keep going up, you'll need to "paint the tape" in a way that ensures all the other bulls in the market continue to be believers. This means your buy programs will periodically take a breather and allow price to pull back to a level that's considered a "normal and healthy" pullback in a trend, with "normal and healthy" being defined by historical price behavior patterns that resulted in higher highs. (Your sell programs will likely be taking some profits as well to build up ammo for the next push up.) Once the level is reached where further pullback would risk making bulls nervous and giving bears confidence, your buy programs will kick in again in an attempt to give confidence to other bulls and buyers waiting on the sideline that the up trend is about to resume. Past price behavior guides future actions because as a large trader you need to attract believers to maintain an environment conducive to supporting your thesis, and it's human nature to believe that if something happened several times in the past it's likely to happen again. That is why you can look at historical charts for decades and see the same patterns repeating in defined trends and both wide and narrow ranges. There aren't any new and revolutionary ways to attract buyers or sellers into the markets so the usual tactics are applied again and again, whether they're technically based (charts/indicators) or fundamentally based (news and opinion).
Your post earlier implied real traders are legendary day traders who have for decades secretively profited continuously from market noise. I find that nearly impossible to believe.