I can appreciate that notion. Though we are talking about learning history rather than making predictions. Heck, all my points on this thread pertained to the danger I see with charts, I do see usefulness in glancing at charts, just not for predictions.
I misread. My bad. Still, I don't see anything which confirms your claim beyond your anecdotes. It contradicts what I've been told and read elsewhere.
You heard and read that professionals use charts and TA for price predictions? Where? When? 25 years perhaps.
You're the one with the outrageous claim that professional traders as a whole consider chart analysis a waste of time. The burden of proof is on you.
Price often travels between past levels of interest, often price will breakthrough these levels and for these times I have risk management in place. That's how I try to extract money trading charts. Admittedly, it's probably inferior to how you trade. Yet, it works.
You’re being fooled by randomness. Imbalance in supply/demand is what causes prices to move. Two types of price volatility exist: transient and permanent. Transient price volatility is mean reverting, permanent price volatility is part of a trend. What serves as the basis of a trend is buying or selling by institutional investors or whales. If you can understand the investment rationale of those folks you can front run them and profit. Your chart pattern is not going to tell you this. Sophisticated investors are using algo orders to obfuscate their presence. The usage of such does not plot onto a price chart lol. Technical analysis is looking at price AND volume, which is useful. Chart patterns outside of general up/down/ranging are not capturing any of that. Going back to TSLA — if you see a spike up in price with small size, it tells you that it probably wasn’t a large trader. You must have a view on the stock (and what would drive other investors to it) before you trade it. Otherwise you are trading blind.
You're excluding speculators, we are all speculators and like it or not, we watch same levels, because they are apparent. It's not randomness. But I respect your opinion. To add, of course randomness is present in markets, I don't deny this.