RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Oh the dramaAH, Metal... perhaps one day you will join me in the cage, or better yet, they will let me out of mine. Bananas were great this morning... only slightly brown.
You're making some assumptions that I have never claimed.
I never once said the squiggly lines predict anything. Rather, like the fundamental analysis, technicals show trends, patterns, etc of investor sentiment over time. Since market prices are directly related to sentiment (sentiment about fundamental interpretation in part) and only indirectly related to fundamentals, I believe it is viable to pay attention to market sentiment... long term or short. Example: "resistance at $4.60" means that the last most recent time there was an equilibrium between optimism/pessimism it occurred at that price. Whether you like it or not, and regardless of whether it is fundamental based or purely a self-fulfilling prophecy, the likelihood that the price will meet resistance at that price after a reversal is better than 50%. Who know why? who cares why?
You said, "There is randomness which cannot be modeled. There is human behavior which cannot be predicted. There's manipulation and machine trading which neither you or I can fathom". THAT is precisely what TA reveals. You cannot know all of the factors involved in sentiment, and you cannot model them going forward.
What you can do is see where all of those random factors led to an equilibrium (support/resistance).
Other lines (trend lines) can show you the pace at which those unknowable subjective factors seem to accept a rise or fall in price over time; if the price moves too far away from that trend, there is a better than 50% likelihood that sentiment sellers will stop selling or buyers will stop buying until the pace of price change comes back within their expectations.
When those trend lines are broken, it simply shows that "for some reason" the market players think the overall change in price over time has gone too far and the likelihood that they think the trend should reverse is more than 50%. Buyers will start to sell or sellers will start to buy.
These, and all the other technical charts are not predicting the future, they are interpreting what the entire market is telling them about the investment and its worth... in the past and in the present.
It's no different than everyone on this board saying, "compared to other copper producers, our valuation is rock bottom, as soon as trust is rebuilt this stock will go much higher". Such statements are sentiment statements based on perceived fundamentals... nobody knows whether sentiment will continue, but they can be no more certain whether the fundamentals will continue.
moving averages are not made up. they are factual movements of sentiment over time. If you 50 day average has recently passed above 100 day average, it is a fact that buyer sentiment has begun to influence the market more recently than it had over the more distant past ... that is a change in sentiment. That is a fact. you can decide whether you think it will continue, but the likelihood is greater than 50%.