Yes I agree, but I believe most private traders do it because they like freedom in many senses, the top one being the freedom of committing your own and not someone else's decisions, so do I at a current point. And prefer to only accept clients who I know will always understand everything I do and will not be a menace. I hear you about being relatively small and having the need for infrastructure at some point. Probably one should grow to that point first though and maybe if there still is a wish to continue, building the infrastructure is the logical step forward.
Odds may be lower than 50/50, I don't see it as a critical point of trading. What is critical is that entries provide odds of continuation enough to make trading overall profitable. You can see that I have around 50% profitable trades, but overall average profit factor is still around 1.70 which is quite above the "random luck" for a sample size of 50+ trades I believe. And must say that such a public performance is a new experience for me hence it was associated with some extra stress (trying to "perform") et cetera, which certainly played it's (negative) role.
Van Tharp demonstrated that random entries combined with an oscillating instrument like CL and good money management will also result in profits. Clearly, if you just take more profits than losses as the instrument is oscillating you will profit--- TA has nothing to do with it.
Probably but my win rate is around 50% only lately. And of course I tested random entries with same MM principles applied. Not even closely the same outcome. And logically if it was so, it would be a cash machine for literally anyone, because MM is very simple, but somehow we don't see crowds of traders trading with random entries and being consistently profitable.
Here is a map that I did a few hours back for the Eur and so far it's been pretty good. This is all based on TA outputs. I do something similar "by hand" so to speak because that way I have a better feel for the market. The only reason I am posting is to say TA can most definitely be forward projecting. On my old thread Simplicity in TA I did forward projections every week for quite some time but explaining the basic action on multiple time frames. Although I thought it was simple stuff it was over the heads of all but about a dozen traders who understood MTF concepts. Anyway, I thought I'd bring this out of the closet and dust it off just to show that TA can project future movements in a variety of ways. I still prefer to have the personal feel of the grabbing the market by the throat.
The next selling wave in AAPL is right around the corner-- Price Drivers are very bearish looking right now. surf PS-- remember we need a full 5 minutes above 113,13 to pull the plug on this one,,,,,