Yes, technical analysis needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
At the same time though, it tends to be somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, when a large part of the traders/investors apply the exact same techniques to come to the exact same conclusion, leading to the exact same trading moves... thereby causing exactly that which was predicted.
Wether or not that makes TA correct a priori, or post-priori, I'm not entirely sure..
Still, there's something to be said about knowing what a certain percentage of traders will likely be doing
This is very true. It's tough to tell whether or not Haejin is right - price comes first, news and events later are found to justify it in the collective market psychology.
This is part of why I'm trying to avoid trading decisions based on fundamentals. They just don't seem to work in this market, on the short term. This thing is a rollercoaster.
I actually pretty much only trade on fundamentals. I don't dare rely on TA. TA may say that some crap project will do amazing... and they may be right, but I'm still not touching it with a ten foot pole. I'd rather have both fundamentals and TA on my side, ideally, but fundamentals alone works too. It helps me HODL through those dark, dark times.
"I actually pretty much only trade on fundamentals. "
This hasn't been serving me so well this year. BTC fundamentals have been on a downward trend since SegWit.
I agree that it's nice to have FA and TA line-up.
I know what you mean, but I think in the long run fundamentals always offers more reliability as an investment than trying to stay ahead of the herd and trading back and forth. Trading is risky, but HODL pretty much always works in this market. Except when there's no fundamentals warranting the HODL.
I just buy a 'good one' and hodl = profit, easiest money ever made. When I was chasing the spikes and trying to predict the market, it gave me a ton more stress and uncertainty because I didn't truly believe in the project's fundamentals. I felt I needed to stay on alert constantly in case the price would do something weird.
But when I'm holding something that's got good fundamentals, it's easy getting through the dips, and almost tempting to buy some more.
"I think in the long run fundamentals"
In the long run, we're all dead.
US $ hasn't had fundamentals for at least 20 years, open printing via corruption for 11 years...it's been a terrible short so far.
Of course, we're really talking about 3 different things here: Trading, Investing, and Saving. All distinctly different.