As someone who loves trading technicals I think learning about markets via technicals (like I did) is one of the worst ways to start It’s a rigid framework where grown men argue with each other about the exact Japanese name for a specific candlestick or a box they’ve drawn on an arbitrary time frame It doesn’t teach you the foundations - why markets move, different types of participants, microstructure, order types and their impact, perps vs spot, and all that stuff - market ‘plumbing’ as a category One of the biggest issues with being hyperfocused on technicals is that they don’t teach you principles and market effects Most technical setups can be decomposed into broad buckets which are well-established (trend, mean reversion, momentum, order flow / price impact, vol clustering etc.) A lot of technical analysis is an often unknowing attempt to map those broad market effects into a recognisable pattern But even a technical-first view is better served by understanding the underlying market effect first and then decomposing it, as opposed to focusing on the specific pattern without ever looking at what’s happening under the hood “This type of triangle tends to go up” is a lot less useful than “this type of flow tends to resolve higher over N time frame”, even if you use the same triangle to identify it Another example: if you’re drawing a support level and buying it, you’re assuming some version of buyers being more aggressive than sellers in that area over a given time frame and predicting a higher price as a result - but what does that mean? Shorts closing / taking profit, allowing for mean reversion? Aggressive sellers being absorbed by passive buyers? Some price insensitive buyer predictably stepping in at a value area? Sellers getting margin called and forcibly trading at bad prices/causing a dislocation? Clustering of orders creating some sort of imbalance? And so on. There’s definitely a risk of overthinking this stuff, and you can make money from charts alone But if you haven’t thought about the underlying market effects and ‘plumbing’ for your setups you’ll likely be stuck in rigid pattern matching that doesn’t generalise and isn’t subject to deeper investigation and more nuanced application Even if your main lens remains TA-focused, there is no harm in understanding the stuff you’re trading on a product level (eg perp contract specs, OI, funding, mark/last/index etc) and on a foundational level (why and how markets move) Especially now that you can jam this stuff into an LLM and keep saying “dumb it down” until you get it, no excuse not to do your homework This is something I really wish I did much earlier in my trading life, so hopefully it resonates with a fellow trader stuck in TA psychosis spending his mum’s credit card on a fourth Udemy candlestick course Anyway GM