If I were you, I'd avoid anyone who spews such nonsense. OTOH... TA is valuable and reveals some 100% correlations*... as well as lesser and still profitable correlations... which you can learn and trade. *I like to say such things as it drives the TA haters/doubters out of their F'n minds!
I don't get caught up in others opinions or what they "know", when they often confuse that with what they "think". Big difference. Something either works or it doesn't. Clearly traders have some big pretty edges, including some retail traders who use TA. I don't concern myself with what others think if it's akin to physics or not, or whatever. If you want to trade and be consistently profitable just focus on finding things that work, that are repeatable and clearly defined with a position size that doesn't trigger your amygdala.
Have you seen a lot of rich scientists who studied the stockmarket and have conducted massive studies telling the public how they should trade the stockmarket? The purest form of information, untainted by anything is the stock price and thru the stock price, the price movements as depicted in stockcharts tell you the story of any stock and possible future direction of any stock. Now, nothing is 100% sure but, the big boys (hedge funds, mutual funds, brokers, banks) just follow the trend and make billions every single year. One top hedge fund manager once, remarked "I am just a trend following idiot." Count me among that group. And technical analysis works because it is not biased and fed with disinformation. Contrast that with this ET forum where so called, geniuses tell us what to believe and how we should do as they tell us and they know better?
Trying to bring the scientific method and scientific rigor into finance and TA in particular is a good thing. However, anything from the world of physics that is applied to finance is generally a misapplication of the physics.
Physicists as well as engineers believe that the skills necessary to be successful in their field are the same skills to be successful with TA. The market will show them they are wrong.
Renaissance also bases it's signals off of "repeatable patterns" on the 5 minute charts. That's right, Renaissance and Jim Simons made their billions by day trading patterns off 5 minute charts. Of course there are many on ET who are smarter and more successful than Simons and his team
Simons wondered if there might be a better way to parse their data trove. Perhaps breaking the day up into finer segments might enable the team to dissect intraday pricing information and unearth new, undetected patterns. Laufer began splitting the day in half, then into quarters, eventually deciding five-minute bars were the ideal way to carve things up. Crucially, Straus now had access to improved computer-processing power, making it easier for Laufer to compare small slices of historic data. Did the 188th five-minute bar in the cocoa-futures market regularly fall on days investors got nervous, while bar 199 usually rebounded? Perhaps bar 50 in the gold market saw strong buying on days investors worried about inflation but bar 63 often showed weakness? Laufer’s five-minute bars gave the team the ability to identify new trends, oddities, and other phenomena, or, in their parlance, nonrandom trading effects. Straus and others conducted tests to ensure they hadn’t mined so deeply into their data that they had arrived at bogus trading strategies, but many of the new signals seemed to hold up.
The quote is from The Man who Solved the Market which is the story of Simons, his team and the development of the Renaissance and Medallion Funds.....might be more fruitful to read it than these absurd threads.