This argument is flawed. It is not mass human behavior that moves the market, its the behavior of the mass of capital.
That capital is controlled by humans with human motives, or by "machines" that have been designed to operate in a way by which particular humans would benefit, i.e. according to human wants, needs, desires. Without human beings, there is no market anywhere.
Given the fact that at any time the mass of capital in any instrument can be controlled by one individual -- what u and TA is saying is that it can increase the odds of what one individual will do in the future with the mass of capital.
TA is predicated upon a freely traded, liquid market. A closely held company with a low public float or a futures contract with little widespread interest would not be a good candidate for TA. TA, for example, would not be worth very much if applied to most options contracts, and given the decaying nature of options, TA applied to the underlying might still not yield high probability options trade opportunities very often. Compare also the spot forex market for the Euro/Yen cross and compare it to the market for futures contracts of the same underlying pair. While TA can help one analyze the price action of the spot market, it would be of doubtful and dubious benefit to analyzing the futures for that currency pair.
Someone who controls a substantial sum has a bad burger at shake shack so he dumps his shares --- tA knows this will happen?
Of course not. The assumption of TA is simply that all known information about a market, security, or instrument is reflected to some degree in the current price. It does not even require that information to be widely known - just available to some of the market participants who currently have an interest in that particular security. No one ever claimed TA could
predict that a fund manager would have a bad burger and dump his shares - including the fund manager himself, or he'd have avoided eating the bad burger to begin with, dump his shares, and would have saved himself from getting his stomach pumped.
So long as you insist that TA practitioners believe TA
predicts, rather than identifies and quantifies
probabilities, or so long as you insist that financial markets are a special case to which probabilities do not apply, then you will not believe TA has any value in making decisions in the financial markets. If you believe the latter, then you ought to start making a case here,
supported by evidence that can be
discussed and not your simple argumentative assertions.
If you believe the former, that TA practitioners believe it possesses so-called "predictive powers," I'd direct you to the following passage from Mark Douglas, which succinctly, accurately, and unambiguously to all but the prejudiced, tone-deaf, or otherwise stupid, characterizes how a TA focused trader understands what one's TA set-ups mean:
"when I get a signal from my methodology, at the most fundamental level what this is telling me is that the odds are in my favor that somebody is going to come into the market (this is what the pattern means) and bid it higher than here if I bought or offer it lower than here if I sold. That’s all that it’s saying. Now they’re either gonna come or they’re not, and so as a result I don’t look at this as being a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’; I look at this as ‘How much distance am I going to give the market to move away from my entry point to tell me that they’re either going to come or they’re not, and any further is not worth the cost of finding out.’"
