There's a concept in game theory called the Nash Equilibrium. It can be applied to any game and determined with algorithms but there may be none, there may be many or there may be one we don't know how to find yet. In the game of trading/investing, Everyone (who is rational) would be looking to maximize their own gains with regards to everyone else doing the same in a game where there's little communication available widely other than charts.
However humans do not necessarily act rationally. In an area where most traders are the "Mum and Dad" types with no institutional experience, we can see firsthand how emotions are affecting trades. One such emotion is the most important of them all. Ego. You could be scientific and believe in random walks, you could be more empirical and believe in Elliot waves. One common thing between all of them is:
We don't like to be wrong.
We don't like to suck at predicting markets when we've fuelled them with our hard earned money. We would rather insult others than to make profits. We would rather see the world burn than to see our shorts get liquidated. However, that's irrational.
This is the behaviour of most top Technical analyses ranked in the main page of this website. They really hate to be wrong. They carry the sheer weight of ego that comes from being featured in a very prominent website. It's not their fault they hate to be wrong. But they will be. They're only human and they're sharing their advice (or counter advice - unethical) for free.
My advice to you is: Try to be consistent, have a strategy and don't be too predictable. Your strategy may suck but this is an evolutionary game where at each round you can change your strategy. Everyone knows a downward market is going down, if you're a whale you can destroy that same "everyone" if they acted predictably with their stop losses and shorts. Come up with new strategies that suit you and make profit for you.
The objective of the game is not to win. It's to profit. There's a big difference.
As for TA: Understand oscillating patterns and indicators. most natural occurrences in the world of engineering can be explained with the Fourier series. A series of oscillators with differing weights. Oscillators are just awesome.
There's no great trader. Investing is an area where you carry your ego and its' weight might crush you. You're always sometimes going to be wrong and sometimes right.
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