Quote from the1:
My entire Master's Degree -- Statistical Finance -- is based on the premise that the markets is one gigantic random number generator and 95% of the tools I use are statistical in nature but at the same time, I've stood toe to toe with traders who have come to the industry with backgrounds from the likes of Computer Science or Sociology and wouldn't recognize an Autocorrelation Process if they tripped over it but managed to trade the markets quite competently, nonetheless. To answer the question....does a true random number generator produce patterns? The answer is most definitely yes. I've designed many of them and they have all produced trends, patterns, and chaos. They even produce levels of support and resistance that you would swear are purely psychological if you didn't know better.
So are the markets random? No one will ever be able to answer the question without doubt but it's really not that important because trading profits are more strongly correlated to the talents of the traders, not the design of the system.