I think I understand why you hate TA so much surf. Its because its not a sure thing. You are absolutely right that something that you see in charts over and over again might never, ever work again. But when you see it happen over and over again, does it not make sense to try it a few times to see if it can work again in the future? I mean when you go start your car in the morning, there is no guarantee that it will start again as it did the day before. Maybe the battery is dead, maybe there is no gas. But when you choose to go to the mall, you are using the descriptive power of your car getting you to places you wanted to go before, so now you're using it to predict that it can do so again this time. You don't think twice... you don't call your mechanic in anticipation of it not working, you simply get inside and start it. Most men marry so that they have access to regular sex. (maybe they like meals more.. I'm not sure... LOL) Is there every a guarantee that your wife will have sex with you tomorrow? Maybe today is the last day and this pattern will never repeat. But when you get married, you are using the pattern of married women having sex with their husbands as a way to predict that she will have sex with you in the future. If you wanted a guarantee to have sex tonight, then perhaps you need to have a few lined up just in case your wife says no, but having a wife is a pretty good guarantee to sex. Likewise, patterns from the past are a pretty good guarantee for the future when it comes to trading. It might not happen with even 80% reliability, but when you figure out a risk:reward ratio that is positive, you've got an edge!
OP, Don't try to decipher every session or chart out there. Simply concentrate on researching setups with proven positive expectancy and concentrate on scanning for them and trading them according to plan. Stay away from the rest of the bs and careful with the countless noobs on public forums acting as experienced consistent traders.
Here's something to consider: Traders don't necessarily push price. The side that's in control is the side that pulls its bids lower or moves its offers higher thereby causing those who want in to chase their bids/offers. So if price is falling, the buyers are in control and the sellers have to chase those bids. If there are enough buyers to absorb the offers, price will find "fair value" at that moment in time and often begin to move the other direction as profits get booked and sellers begin to move their offers higher because there's now some demand coming in and they want to sell at a "better" price. This is why price can move significantly on low volume and move very little on high volume.
I don't hate TA at all. Ii just understand what it is and what it is not. I use it everyday in my journalism business to describe what happened in the markets. The problem with yoyr argument is it is built on false pretenses-- patterns don't repeat in such a way that they can be consistently exploited. With that I'll qoute one of the true geniuses of the market-- in fact -- i became friends with his brother from posting on here-- " A price chart is an attempt to model relevant aspects of price change. Price change is not linear displacement, whether vertical, horizontal or oblique. Nonetheless, price change can be represented as vertical displacement and time elapsed as horizontal displacement. Such a model, however, invariably supports relationships that does not correspond to anything in the original process.The angular inclination of a trend on a price chart is a visually striking feature of this representation. Such angles have no intrinsic meaning for the price series, but this is one of the many factors (along with our facility for pattern recognition and wishful thinking) that contributes to our interpreting more from price charts than rigorous testing reveals is there." - William Eckhardt Game, set, match. Any questions true believers? If any of you still have the faith--- surf