Bullshit! The market is not some anonymous, inanimate thing. It's a collection of people making decisions to buy and sell. They base those decisions on a multitude of factors, one of them being psychology. For some it's pretty damn easy to see where some people will put their buy orders and where they'll tell themselves they're wrong.
So to address the OP, yes, sometimes you are lured into going long and then it reverses as soon as you enter. It's called a bull trap. You've decided that if price reaches point X, you're going long. Well, do you really think you're the only person who thinks that going long at point X is a good idea? Do you really think that others can't figure out where you're going to stop out at once price reaches point X?
As a very brilliant man once told me, "You're either a zoo keeper or a zoo inmate" (he was referring to Slaughterhouse 5). If you feel that the market can read your every move, guess which you are.
Trading is about outsmarting others, it's not some computer game.
An omniscient window into the intentions of all of the ("influential") participants would definitely allow us to "outsmart the others".
In general, price action-type TA makes the assumption that if enough influential traders follow the same patterns/phenomena (trends, S/R, Fibo retracements, etc) that they will create an order flow that causes a "self-fulfilling prophecy" to occur.
Indicator-based (or trend-following) TA makes the assumption that long enough trends will occur frequently enough to allow enough pips between entry and exit, on balance, to overcome costs. To whatever extent that is the case, all one needs do, to be long term profitable, is ride these trends.
David
