123Tom's TA study group

[wildcard235]

I've been trying to study technical analysis recently, and these summary points from Wikipedia make sense to me:

Based on the premise that all relevant information is already reflected by prices, technical analysts believe it is important to understand what investors think of that information, known and perceived.

...Price action tends to repeat itself due to investors collectively tending toward patterned behavior – hence technical analysis focuses on identifiable trends and conditions.

What does not make sense to me is going back far in time to try to project current changes, such as your looking back to 2012 for AVXL.

The behavior of investors collectively (enough of them to impact the price) has to be manifested through specific actions, such as setting stop-loss or profit-taking levels. It seems intuitive to me that the farther back in time one looks for things like support and resistance levels, the less likely they are to be relevant. E.g., I had trailing stop-loss orders on AVXL years ago, they hit, and now those levels are irrelevant to my current position in AVXL.

When AVXL hits a new 52-week high now, I consider it blue-sky territory rather than looking back years for a higher resistance level. I imagine some swing traders will look back years to guess at those resistance levels, but will that form the basis of enough profit-taking sell orders or short-sells to stop a rise? I'm a very long-term position trader, so it's only a curiosity to me, but I'm skeptical that a significant number of traders would make bets based on such old data.