it’s impossible to know where this market is going
HODLING IS CRITICAL
Bull phases are always rocked by nasty sell-offs when traders try to GET OUT. You can't play that game because the downside action poisons your psychology and makes it impossible to buy when you should. This is why in a bull phase, you have to hodl even while most of your apparent gains disappear. TRADERS would disagree and call that, "pissing away all you suffered to get". The fact is though, you never really had money from gains, but was just an illusion. Current price deceives investors into thinking they’ve made X amount of dollars but in reality, current price is just a bunch of lines on a chart and don't tell you what something is actually worth.
When prices decline TRADERS automatically think they will decline more, and when they rise they doubt they will rise more. That's what they call bull phase and bull market sentiment. You don't get a fair assessment of sentiment from price action nor from the pile of lines and patterns that comes from charting, trend lines are simply shell game producers.
Efficient market theory doesn't say that you can't make money in the market. It does say you can't use artificial methods to make money because the market is efficient up to current knowledge and artificial methods only deliver current knowledge at best. Thus, the market is almost instantaneously efficient and it is in this epsilon time frame that trading attempts to operate. Trading attempts to fight the market and its efficiency. Therefore, put efficiency in markets on your side and gain.
WHAT ABOUT TECHNICAL ANALYSIS, CHARTS, GRAPHS, TRENDS?
Though many short-term traders rely on these types of methods the truth is, the market doesn't remember past fluctuations of any amplitude. All pattern reading assumes it does but that's simply mathematically impossible. Efficient market doesn't say trends don't exist. When a market is efficient the fluctuations are randomly distributed and discover asymptotically the fundamental value trend in a time frame outside of trading time frames. Trends are dynamic too.
At best when performing these tasks, you’re inventing a connection by seeing patterns, the same patterns that occur in all random processes.
This next thought is very important! Past performance is no indication of future performance. I’ll say it again, past performance is no indication of future performance. Track record and pattern recognition will do no better than flipping a coin. You're better off guessing the future without using any technical inputs that could wrongly bias you from past action. This can be captured somewhat by thinking, "Coins have to look somewhat bad/good to be buy/sell candidates". Again it all goes back to poisoning one's psychology from making the right move.
If you want to make real money in this market you must ignore these types of methods. You won't succeed unless you do. Many of the worlds top pros would agree. Most pros would tell you it takes time and patience for an investment to come to fruition. Patience absolutely requires ignoring patterns and hodling coins you believe in.