[nradov]

I don't understand your point. If TA can't generate alpha then why bother? Whether stocks exhibit momentum or not is irrelevant if you can't profitably trade off of it.

Look at it this way. TA is fundamentally a matter of pattern recognition. If it actually worked then you could program a computer to recognize the patterns and automatically put in trades. But if everyone does that then any profit opportunity is almost instantly arbitaged away, and thus TA quickly stops working (if it ever worked at all).