So... a lot of smug comments on both sides claiming what technical analysis is and isn't. Let's get something straight, there are only two ways of analysing markets: fundamentally or technically.
I've been actively trading nearly every day for the past 6 months and can tell you there are people who extract profits from the market every single day (I'm not one of them yet, but I'm at least modestly profitable the past few months). Being profitable every day can ONLY be done using technical analysis. You're not going to profit every single day doing intraday trades on fundamentals. People think 'technical analysis' is as simple as what this blog post mentions - using something as rudimentary as SMAs. Unfortunately, this is case for most people. Come back when:
- you know what auction market theory is (AMT)
- you know what one time framing is (OTF)
- you know what delta divergence is
- you know what poor market structure / single prints / excess all are
- you know what low / high volume reversals are
All these are NOT fancy indicators or contrived signals but are quite literally real structures and residuals of actual BUYERS and SELLERS in a market (i.e. exactly what a market is, NOT astrology!) that can help show where the markets MAY go (of course the future is never certain)
Further more, you have to synthesize the context of all of these things in real time as the session unfolds and block out any of the emotions or psychology of putting money on the table entails! To get to this top tier (being profitable nearly every day) is as hard and takes as much time as any other performance profession (athletes, sales, etc.)
Of course you're going to have an extremely bad time if you try and implement something like a SMA crossover!
Think of it this way: any automated technical strategy you can think up within even a few days of effort have been done over 1000 times by every financial firm on the planet - and you can guess they don't work - if they did there would be a lot more billionaires on the planet! Most of the automated strategies that are actually profitable are designed by engineers with the help of decades+ traders who have been consistently profitable. Even then, you'll be lucky if in a raw win/loss ratio is over 50% (but this gets into expected value of the trade, etc. too long to post about here, you can be profitable with just a 30% win rate, for example if you're reward to risk is 2:1)
Anyway, thats my 2 cents from someone who trades with real money on the line. It's probably pretty easy to say that TA is made up and use it as a scapegoat when you YOLOed a bunch of money on GME and lost it a few years back.