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Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? by jjoonathan on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @12:19PM (#36864724)
If two people at an auction get into a bidding war, do the bids tell you nothing about their psychology?
Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? by teeray on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @12:38PM (#36865115)
You may think so, until it’s revealed that one of the bidders makes all bidding decisions by roll of a die / flip of a coin (you can invent some scheme for doing so).
Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? by jjoonathan on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @01:21PM (#36865863)
A coinflip that causes a bidding war is a loaded coin. There is information in that.

More importantly, it's backed by genuine human intent to buy whatever the coin says. There is information in that too.

This is very far from the zero information situation that you were trying to set up, lol.

Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? by pessimizer on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @01:43PM (#36866294)
You don't get "genuine human intent" from the results of a coin flip. You don't even get to know it's a coin flip.
Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? by jjoonathan on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @04:07PM (#36868570)
All models are wrong, some models are useful.

The goal of technical analysis is to find pools of supply and demand at different price points, much like a clustering algorithm. It is reductive by its very nature but it's still a useful approximation because big interpretable clusters can absolutely drive price action and it's helpful to have a model for that. On a good day, you might get the biggest 2 or 3 clusters correct to within 10% and miss several others totaling 1000000x the size and importance of a hypothetical bozo trading based on a coin flip, and this highly imperfect outcome would still be enormously valuable and worth pursuing.

It's like politicians assembling a platform by considering the sizes and interests of voting blocs. This strategy was always going to be a reductive, imperfect, noisy mess but that doesn't make it irrational or useless.

Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? by patmorgan23 on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @01:53PM (#36866478)
Not necessarily. A truly random coin could land on head 100 times in a row. Such is the nature of randomness
Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? by AlexandrB on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @12:29PM (#36864922)
It depend on whether they are also trying to use each other's bids to determine each other's psychology. At that point you may be observing a recursive system (I know that he knows that I know that he knows...) and can't be sure how many layers of reasoning each actor is employing.
Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? by Art9681 on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @12:26PM (#36864853)
Behavior is different at different scales but I see your point. I typically walk to my car after an event, but if I see a group take off running with urgency I will probably do the same thing. Know what I mean?
Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? by pessimizer on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @01:42PM (#36866276)
Not with the prices alone. You need a context to use the prices for insight. They could literally be using the bids as a channel to communicate with each other because they are colluding, or as a performance for observers.