Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler’s reliability, the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.
I've never read any Wittgenstein but I don't think he was a trader. Still, you say TA doesn't work because it can't work. I say most people can't use it effectively, and the vast majority of them are trying to use it intra-day. But there are people who are using it effectively, on a year in year out basis so I guess that means it does work. Though I'm not such a fascist about TA that I think I can predict where price will go in the next 5 minutes.......
This thread is about TA and its use by day traders who use intra-day charts and apply TA to it to predict future based on past. I never made the claim that you say I did & for the record, whether I believe that or not is another discussion. I can say with certainty that technical analysis and fundamental analysis are of no help for predicting the future where it matters; the tails.
Wait a minute! You're not a Herr Wittgenstein from Vienna by any chance are you? Just passing the time here under an assumed name?
Consider this statement: "90% of all day traders lose money". Of course, that implies that 10% do make money. Assuming the statement is true over any 10 year period, that's not random. Can we say that in the future 90% of all day traders will lose money? Probably yes based on the historical data. That's just a simple statistic. But what does it say about the markets they're trading? 10% have found an "edge". If you attribute most of the 90% failure to incompetence, then the 10% are doing something or have found something that has a probability of success. Whatever that something is, it has to be in the market data itself. Whether it's TA, order flow or an algorithm, apparently 10% can make money over the long haul. It's unfortunate that this business is worse that the CIA - accessing real data on real traders is practically impossible - no one wants to reveal their holy grail. That said, the statistic above in all likelihood still holds. How do we account for the 10%?
May I ask, why do you take your knowledge so seriously? I take my knowledge seriously because I believe living a life in which knowledge is treated as weighty and important; and characterized by deep, earnest, and sincere thought, is likely to be better lived than a life in which knowledge is treated as frivolous and unimportant; and characterized by surface-level, halfhearted, insincere thought. I suspect the difference between me and you is that if you and I were to actually trade the same asset for a day, a week, a month, a year, or even ten years, I would utterly destroy, obliterate, and annihilate you as my competitor.
Here's a chart of a spread that uses technical and fundamental analysis. This is the large cap small cap spread, Dow VS Russell. Momentum and crossovers make the selloff obvious. Does this one count? It's a chart of the ES PREM. This one is strongly predictive of price action and actually trades on SP 500 technical levels, momentum included.