..and the "powers that be" are always a variable to deal with - no different than with any other high volume, large cap, stock - just like how the market reads into the fundamentals will always play into the price. The most power is always in the hands of those with either most knowledge or the most cash.
Unfortunately for the common investor/trader, most of those who're wealthy got there because of their knowledge of the market in the first place. So not only are they better at reading the market...they mostly dictate what it does, because they have the bulk of the supply and the most power of demand.
TA figures them in just as well as it does the fundamentals, they need not be looked at separately from what you see on the chart because it too is a constant part of the dynamic of the market...it's part of the overall psychology of the collective.
The "powers that be" can't use TA against us without simultaneously creating new patterns of behavior that we may use to predict future price performance. Our ability to notice patterns and correlations within those patterns is something that may always benefit us - and that's what TA is really about. Yes, the dynamics of the market can and will change over time, but that's where our ability to notice the new patterns becomes useful.
The market is dynamic, it has millions of variables, but it can never be effected by anything outside of our own psychology. At the end of the day, even with all the environmental or economical signals that a stock "should" be doing something, it's the collective decisions of all the individuals that make it up that determines whether it goes up or down. It doesn't have to make sense why it's behaving the way it does, just like it doesn't have to make sense why a person is behaving the way he or she does based on the circumstances.
Don't get me wrong,I would gladly be wrong on my call, here...and there's a good chance that I will be. My only point is that such patterns do have statistical significance...so why bet against them?
