The goal of technical analysis is to find pools of supply and demand at different price points, much like a clustering algorithm. It is reductive by its very nature but it's still a useful approximation because big interpretable clusters can absolutely drive price action and it's helpful to have a model for that. On a good day, you might get the biggest 2 or 3 clusters correct to within 10% and miss several others totaling 1000000x the size and importance of a hypothetical bozo trading based on a coin flip, and this highly imperfect outcome would still be enormously valuable and worth pursuing.
It's like politicians assembling a platform by considering the sizes and interests of voting blocs. This strategy was always going to be a reductive, imperfect, noisy mess but that doesn't make it irrational or useless.
The goal of technical analysis is to find pools of supply and demand at different price points, much like a clustering algorithm. It is reductive by its very nature but it's still a useful approximation because big interpretable clusters can absolutely drive price action and it's helpful to have a model for that. On a good day, you might get the biggest 2 or 3 clusters correct to within 10% and miss several others totaling 1000000x the size and importance of a hypothetical bozo trading based on a coin flip, and this highly imperfect outcome would still be enormously valuable and worth pursuing.
It's like politicians assembling a platform by considering the sizes and interests of voting blocs. This strategy was always going to be a reductive, imperfect, noisy mess but that doesn't make it irrational or useless.