That is, since everyone knows that everyone knows about technical analysis, the value it may have had is long since sucked out of it. And in any submarket where a participant has the market power to paint the tape, all following technical analysis will do is allow then to make traps for you and drive your trading activity in response to the technical analysis.
It is possible that super-long-term technical analysis has some meaning, and there's some generalized principles about how to read things like depth of the market off of the tape, but I'm not convinced deeply about the utility of technical analysis in general.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of the market is driven by institutional investors and the prices are largely set by those big players. Let's say that TA works, but it doesn't scale to that level (i.e. it only provides returns on marginal volume).
TA would never grow large enough to compete with the institutional investors who are actually driving the market, it would never gain pricing authority, and the gains would continue to be available to anybody playing in the margins.
As an analogy- you could say that you're scavenging for scraps behind a big fish. Sure, it doesn't scale. And sure, not everybody can do it or it would fail. But, if there are enough big fish, and you don't mind waiting for scraps, there's food to be had
Note that this is no argument for or against TA, it may still be bogus. I just don't think you can assume it's bogus because it would get priced in
That is, since everyone knows that everyone knows about technical analysis, the value it may have had is long since sucked out of it. And in any submarket where a participant has the market power to paint the tape, all following technical analysis will do is allow then to make traps for you and drive your trading activity in response to the technical analysis.
It is possible that super-long-term technical analysis has some meaning, and there's some generalized principles about how to read things like depth of the market off of the tape, but I'm not convinced deeply about the utility of technical analysis in general.