You perfectly described what the TA arena is like. On professional trading you should not comment because you clearly never worked in the professional S&T field. I and my spouse have, for 2 decades, day in, day out.
please man, i don't debate with many people here because its a waste of time. Those guys are 70+, 80+ and almost 100. They essentially buy and hold and out last everyone else, from a trading standpoint. Sure they pick solid companies and everything ok perfect, but realistically in practical terms for the retail trader what does that have to do with the validity of TA or the lack there of? I am sure you realize how most people, including ones that feign edges actually make money right? It's via account size, position size, time and a lot of them rely on the natural bullish bias of major us equity markets / stocks. So, not sure if you're saying TA is completely useless or not, but if so that's just ignorance. As far as I why I edited in my post is because, it's stupid conversations like this I want to avoid. Are you willing to get on voice and screen share your entries and exits live, while explaining your trade? If not what you say has no validity to me. It's so ridiculous how you guys want to sit here and debate stupid crap. It's mind boggling. I don't get the point.
Depends on the fund strategy, some quant funds like and die by technical analysis. For the macro long/funds they don't use technical analysis for trade ideas, but use it to time their trade entry and exits.
Even institutions use indicators. Don't believe me? Pivots. ((H+L+C)/3). Even if it is insanely bad to use, they do it.
Who does what? Specifics if you don't mind. I honestly have not seen a single prop trader at any hedge fund and ibank prop group use TA even once in over 20 years. Vwap yes but that's not a technical indicator, it's because that group offered guaranteed Vwap to clients.
I walked into a few very, very succesful hedge funds and all the traders had books with candle stick patterns on the desk. In the evening they followed webinars on how to correctly draw trendlines on their free tradingview charts.