Trading should be reactive as opposed to being predictive. The problem is when traders assume they know what is going to happen next. Now, I may look to StockCharts of positions I have and see that say, the stock is going down, I have a put option trade on it and a rational assumption unless, proven otherwise, is the trend will continue. So, my stop loss is not hit and it continues going downward. I did not know that ahead of time. It could have just as easily, gone up and blew thru my stop loss, exiting the trade. That is the reason you have stop losses because you do not know what will happen next. That way, you got your bases covered.
People assuming probability to somehow mean certainty is the biggest way to lose money. I remember reading "Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets" and losing my ass because I just knew ascending triangles meant it was going up and head and shoulders meant it was going down.
Thomas Bulkowski has a book where he analyzed the different chart patterns and their success and failure rates and a lot of them are at most, a 50/50 probability of working out. The safest assumption then, is to assume that it would fail. Planning for the worst case scenario enables you to be ready when and if it happens.
Smart money hunts liquidity, they enter positions where most do exit @Bugsy. Usually f.e. below a double top there are sellers, presenting good buying opportunities for bulls. So bulls might setup a double top to encourage selling if they can afford pushing price afterwards (not too much selling expected)
Greats points. I've been wondering for a while what the effect of all these YouTube channels teaching pretty much the same things to millions of new traders is having on the big fish decision process. When is it no longer proper TA but more simply creating the patterns or breaking averages they know will trigger movement up or down. The big trading platforms have an incredible amount of data that would be amazing to crunch for triggers and behavior analysis from psy and sociological perspectives. I wouldn't be surprised if the data showed very similar responses to triggers that big money already is both aware and profiting from, where pump and dump schemes are only low hanging fruits.