| What do you think a good portion of HFT algos do? Of course people are exploiting the order flow that comes as a result of generic "signals". But my point is that technical ANALYSIS is the utilization of TOOLS. People apply tools in different ways. Especially with fibonacci, there is certainly not one way to trade using fibonacci retracements, extensions, time, harmonics, etc.. I know traders who use it completely differently than I do. What matters is how it's applied to a chart and how trading decisions are made based on how the trader interprets what they're seeing. It sounds like you guys are describing things like MA crosses to be useless. How they're normally applied by new traders is "the red crossed the green, so I sold", then they get mad when they lose money on the trade (and blame technical analysis). Yet, a moving average is a tool which can be tweaked in numerous ways - how you tweak/apply/interpret/trade using that tool is an entirely other question. Nobody in the right mind should be trading using only one tool, or by applying an "out of the box" charting tool then just blindly making decisions based on that. Liken this to a software context: "Sensitive data can get stolen, so software is BAD". Yet, it's really just how it's written, up/downsides that are inherent of the language it's written in, but mainly HOW it was designed and how businesses utilized or tweaked it. You can't generalize the entire software industry because of security holes. If you reduce technical analysis to generic "super awesome signal, works every time!" marketing ploys, you'll miss one of the best edges you could possibly have in trading/investing. Note: This disagreement is a perfect example of why volume exists on each side of the market. |