So, my current stance on TA is:
1) Patterns do exist.
Proof: Statistical evidences (fat tails etc) and my poll
that shows that belief in TA is (almost) not correlated with self-deception.
2) However, an average trader cannot profit from it.
Proof: trading is zero-sum game, so majority loses. If this majority uses some TA, majority of TA users cannot profit from it.
3) However, an average trader wrongly believes he can profit from it.
Proof: he trades using TA.
So, at which conditions you can profit from TA? I can thing of three cases:
-You just get lucky.
-Average trader is using TA, but you are much better in TA than average trader (you have a magic monkey, for example
).
-Average trader is not using TA (influx of noobs), while you are using those TA's instruments that cannot be explained just by belief in TA (like, you use MACD, but not fibs).
That's pretty much my stance on TA. And your discussion of "the truth" in the OP is basically my stance on whether the US did 9/11. And my ideology is somewhere in the vicinity of anarcho-capitalism. (I say "somewhere in the vicinity" because that term probably implies different things to different people, and I am not all of those things. Recently, agorism has caught my attention, though I have not studied it in depth.)