Just one of the greatest traders of all time--- Maybe you heard of these guys? I realized technical analysis didn’t work when I turned the charts upside down and didn’t get a different answer.” -----------Warren Buffett Charts are great for predicting the past.” ------------Peter Lynch
Maybe you've heard of this guy? “Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.” ― James Burke This denigration of past data is downright infantile. Nobody has a crystal ball that shows the future so stop acting like using past data is some social faux pas. Everybody does it, including people like you who deny doing it, surf. Enough already.
TA alone has always been a fraud, not sure why so many traders still fall for it, maybe blindness of the mind ? it's ok though when used in combination with Fundamental analysis
'This paper presents a unique test of the effectiveness of technical analysis in different sentiment environments by focusing on its usage by the most sophisticated and astute investors, hedge fund managers. We document that during high-sentiment periods, hedge funds using technical analysis exhibit higher returns, lower risk, and superior market-timing ability than those non-users. The advantages for hedge funds of using technical analysis disappear in low-sentiment periods. These findings are consistent with the view that technical analysis performs relatively better in high-sentiment periods with larger mispricing, which cannot be fully exploited by arbitrage activities due to short-sale impediments. " http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2457289
What this is saying is that in good times, everyone is doing the same things, all following each other high expectation basically following lemmings,