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Thanks for the reply. What we share in common is a belief that no common methods of guessing short term movements of stock prices are terrific for predicting short term price movements. News or macros can cause price movements that are totally unexpected and overrule the expected movements. Even fundamentals can be of dubious help in short term predictions, as we've seen with truly unexpected price movements after an earnings report.
That said, tools such as technical analysis and spotting repeating patterns of apparent manipulation can aid an investor's profitability. What really caught my attention about technical analysis was how
@Curt Renz would talk about a Fibonacci retracement level when we were experiencing one of those hellacious mega-dips in previous years, and lo and behold the bottom of the dip turned out to be precisely the number Curt put forward. He did this multiple times. The ability of the stock to bounce off upper and lower bollinger bands is so common that attributing such behavior to chance is ludicrous. I really don't know if technical analysis is such a precise distillation of human psychology or if it works simply because there are people controlling large amounts of money who THINK it works (and it therefore affects their buying and selling behavior) but the result is that technical analysis sometimes does have predictive powers.
As for manipulations, we very often see the stock price take a big dip in the second half of the week and close very near the price where call options dominate going up and put options dominate going down. I've listened to explanations why this might be a natural phenomenon rather than a manipulation, but whatever the cause the result is the same: a sale price for Tesla shares and options at the end of the week and a good chance you will see a higher price come Monday.
You see, here's the thing. You haven't personally benefitted from TA or placed bets on perceived manipulation patterns, but that doesn't mean that other people aren't benefitting from these tools. Over the past 18 months I'm up over 20X with my TSLA investments and I couldn't have done that with pure HODL investing in stock. You suggest I should test my beliefs, but that is exactly what I do with my investment decisions on a regular basis. Live and let live, my friend, we'll both do well with TSLA.