TA is primarily pitched to retail by discount brokers and “educators” (who don’t make a living off their pnl), as a way to induce orders. Fundamental equity research is hard which scares away a lot of retail. Discount brokers would be starving for order flow if they didn’t preach TA. It’s the qanon of trading.
Stop bashing technical analysis just because retail traders use them!! LOL Technical analysis is not that useless. It's an organized and systematic way of looking at price action. It just needs to be used in the context of fundamental factors. Many technical analysis concepts like the Elliott Waves and Gann systems are based on mathematical phenomenons, the Fibonacci sequence and the stochastic system is based on random probability distribution. Some of the technical analysis indicators like the MACD and moving averages are statistical models. Technical analysis might be "pitched" to retail traders but these are not concepts created out of thin air or are voodoo science. Institutional traders do analyze price action using technical analysis concepts as well.
People don't use fundamental analysis not because it's hard; it's because the timing of its impact is not predictable. The MBS was shit because of mortgage fraud and how long did it take before it finally impacted the market and took the market down in 2008? Michael Burry was able to short the market continuously because he had hundreds of millions of dollars under management. Retail investors don't. And even trading with hundreds of millions of dollars, Michael Burry faced possible lawsuits from his investors because he refused their withdrawal requests when the fund was tanking. Retail investors simply won't be able to do it cuz we don't have that kind of money. We don't have time nor the hundreds of millions of dollars to wait it out while suffering millions of dollars of losses for some fundamental factors to finally materialize into PA for us to profit; we need something quick, something with a good degree of accuracy for us to analyze the PA in order to take trading action, for us to get in, get out, book the profit and done. That's how we trade. Retail traders use technical analysis more because it suits our trading style. We can do long-term investing based on some fundamental factors but that's not going to generate income from trading for us. The whole point of us trading full-time is to generate income on a periodic basis.
