It may be time for a sizable chunk of the literate world to simply agree to disagree with surf. Those that are making money with PA (and maybe a technical or two thrown in) can simply enjoy that he is wrong and, of course, enjoy the profit they produce. Continue the debate if you like but my opinion is there is no serious debate left to have here.
so far, I have not seen any proof that ta works on this site. cornix proved nothing so far although used mighty words. same with JH. Everyone else seem to be comfortable commenting after the fact with use of ta and maybe displaying couple of trades. although bighog explains what TA does, but using TA constructs to approximate future behaviour od owners of existing orders is not enough. There is another group which is waiting to enter. And TA seem to use - if price get here they will start selling again. Doesn't seem to work, agree with MS.
All this complaining for no reason... Trading is a combination of science and art. There are many ways to trade; not just one. Some people use TA and others use FA (or both), but there is no "right" way to trade. Different strategies give different results because no such trade is ever the same. New strategies are created every day and most may or may not work depending on the traders ability to correctly predict future price action. Some may make more of a profit and others may make less. Just because you can't trade TA doesn't mean it doesn't work. You guys are treating it like there is only one "right" way to trade. There is more than enough proof that TA and FA work to their own extent depending on how strict or loose the trader is with his money. Just because you don't see a lot of these succesful traders on ET doesn't mean they don't exist. If I were making a lot of money using my own strategy then I certainly wouldn't expose myself for questioning by a lot of noob traders who only want to leech of me. That would reduce my profits and possibly destroy my strategy completely. Most of these traders stay in the dark.
I am sick of people claiming they can read from price what next news release will do to prices. Maybe they can detect from price the text and exact numbers that is acceptable thinking for beginner but there is more to it than price to improve odds. Looks like majority get stuck on this level forever.
Actually you haven't even touched the surface of what price action can do. Give me a couple of minutes, I will look at Friday's ES chart and it will reveal what you will have for breakfast this coming Monday.