Technical Analysis Fallacy

hello, started reading thread last month.

Feel so lucky to find this gem. Tks for your knowledge, tks for everything @fti

I agree with much of what you said, especially the point that no mentor, course, book, or public indicator can hand someone the “holy grail” of trading. In fact, that is exactly the problem.
The market does not fail because technical analysis has no value. It fails for most people because once a method becomes widely known, the market starts to absorb it, front-run it, distort it, and eventually neutralise it.
Mathematically, a public edge decays.
If we define edge as:
Edge = Signal Quality - Noise - Crowding - Transaction Cost
then every public tool has a natural decay curve. The more traders use the same signal, the more the market adapts around it. What may have once worked as a clean probability model becomes contaminated by participation.
This is why Larry Williams, the Turtle Traders, Wilder’s indicators, MACD, RSI, stochastic, moving averages, Fibonacci, Elliott, Gann, and many others can all “work” at certain times, but fail when treated as fixed truth. They are not useless. They are incomplete.
The issue is not indicators versus no indicators.
The real issue is this:
Static tools fail in adaptive markets.
Markets are not dead equations. They are living mathematical systems influenced by time, liquidity, positioning, volatility, human behaviour, algorithms, and institutional execution. So if your method is fixed, public, and obvious, the market eventually encapsulates it.
That is why I believe the real path is different.
After 22 years of studying markets, indicators, cycles, price action, Gann, Elliott, Fibonacci, technical analysis, and almost every major approach, I have come to one conclusion:
The only serious way forward is to treat the market as a scientific and mathematical problem — not as a chart pattern guessing game.
This is where Jim Simons is the best example.
He did not become successful by selling indicators, giving public courses, or showing everyone the exact formula. He built a private research machine. Mathematics, science, statistics, data, secrecy, testing, and constant refinement were the foundation.
That does not mean there is a magical formula. It means the edge is not one indicator. The edge is the research process.
The real equation is closer to:
Market Edge = Hidden Structure + Timing + Probability + Risk Control + Secrecy + Adaptation
Most people are looking for the signal on the chart.
The smarter question is:
What number, equation, timing model, or hidden structure is the market respecting before the chart makes it obvious?
That is where I believe the next level of market work begins.
So yes, I agree that public technical studies are not the holy grail. But I would go one step further.
The failure is not that markets have no structure.
The failure is that most people are using public, lagging, over-shared tools to find private, forward-moving market behaviour.
To see the real movement, the approach must change.
Less public indicator worship.
More mathematics.
More science.
More testing.
More secrecy.
More adaptive modelling.
That, in my opinion, is the real lesson from Jim Simons.

but of course all we have is historical data, the future is not ours to see, whatever we use to find an edge requires reliance on historical data, unless we are privy to inside information. Our job is to find the patterns in the history of that data to determine the probabilities of what might happen next, this is the essence of quantitative analysis, whatever data we use to form our correlations is always from the past, technical indicators are merely tools to help us visualise that data.

For me it is about reverse engineering what the market has determined to be a signal, I am looking for the self fulfilling prophecies as it were. No trader is an island, we need to work out where most of the money is moving based on how it moved before, we need to run with the heard. I only trade algorithmically, and automatically, everything is coded, I am sceptical of pure discretionary trading, no one can see the future and my computer is a billion times better at executing algorithms than my brain.

That's great, i was trying to post something in reply but mods seem to have something against providing an alternative opinion ( apologies , maybe another time)

Next you're going to tell me ZAPPA crying BTC manipulation every day is some how not just a child playing a serious mans game and that he won't possibly lose to a simple buy and hold of SPX.

I mean, c'mon man, there's something there, i just know it... rofl.

BTW excellent post.

I spent many years as a professional Blackjack player before coming back into trading, talking with the ploppies all day is enough to make you go mental, I had to learn to act like them, react like them, talk like them. At least in trading they don't generally sit over your shoulder and tell you how bad your decisions are and how you don't have enough experience to sit at the last box or some other kind of woo woo shite. But really we should feel sorry for these fools, they have a gambling problem, I lost a friend to it, he lost so much money he topped himself at 35, a genuinely smart and decent man, but when it came to the buzz of roulette or even spread betting he was a disaster, such a shame