Well, the thing is that it once had value. But before computers and the internet and real time data made creating all sorts of charts really easy. Jesse Livermo

Well, the thing is that it once had value. But before computers and the internet and real time data made creating all sorts of charts really easy. Jesse Livermore is regarded as an early technician in that he would spot price patterns that he interpreted to signify behavior. For example if he saw a lot of buying while people were bearish he would reason that there were insiders who knew something driving the buying. And yes, he did hand chart stock prices meticulously according to a particular system. But again, in those days it took a tremendous amount of work. Hell, stock indices which we all take for granted today were largely created because it was so difficult to know at a given moment what the overall market was doing and tabulating those was a ton of work by today’s standards. But now technical analysis has been democratized and everyone has access to the same indicators. So the value has been destroyed. This brings me to a larger point. Markets are constantly evolving to take what used to be hardly noticed and difficult to understand and make it the focal point of everyone after it works. But people fail to realize that because so much attention is now placed on it that it changes the market in the process so that that thing no longer has significance. One recent example- the fed used to not even tell you that they had changed the fed funds rate! So some clever market observers would follow the prime rate and figured out that there was a relationship between that and the stock market. Eventually everyone caught on and so the fed itself became politicized and so now they telegraph to the market what they’re going to weeks and sometimes months in advance. So what the market might only begin to price in after like a rate hike now gets priced in months before they start hiking. This has caused market cycles to be thrown out of whack and very few can make sense of it because they believe market should continue to behave with similar timing as before.