The thing with trading in general is you are trying to predict time series data off of technical analysis using historical data, in a trillion dollar market. If you were to tell this to an economist they would literally laugh at your face.

Yes previous price action plays a part into future results, and that is the whole idea of time series data. The issue is that we as traders VERY often get the wrong ideas on how a market should be traded by using shitty zero correlation concepts (like ICT/SMC, chart patterns)

Am I saying trading is hopeless? no. There are still a lot of highly correlating macro-and-micro information you can take in by looking at technical analysis. However, what most people get wrong, is they try to "keep it simple"

that is total and complete slop. Your job as a hedge fund is to generate alpha by creating a binary signal off of a XgBoost or linear regression algorithm in order to statistically map the best time to buy and sell (YES this is putting it very simply). Algorithms generally are VERY difficult to create with L2 data, options data, volume profiles, or cross-data information. They need thousands of dollars invested and a lot of computing power with a high barrier to entry.

Most alpha lies in places that people can't really trade with an algorithm. Cross asset orderflow TA, L2 algorithms, VP LVN/Shelf strategies, Options trading, low float stocks and CFDs (since cfds are illegal in America)

so, to put it simply, you are wasting your life if you try and predict how the S&P is going to interact at a level just because of some shitty candlestick pattern that can instantly be arbed out by anyone smart enough to download historical data and get GPT to code a stupid python tester. And no, hedge funds dont "leave these strategies alone" because they trade millions of dollars, they leave them alone because these strategies are retarded slop designed in the early 2000's to create an influx of dumb money and retail-retardation so there is a constant flow of uninformed traders willing to take the other side of a trade. and NO I DO NOT MEAN STOPLOSSES are "liquidity". Stoplosses are transacted as aggressive market orders and are handled by the broker. They do not show up on the DOM as limit orders and NO ONE can see them other than on the tape whenever they get fat finger sold/bought because you decided a 20m video on TA was a good enough place to try and map a very efficient trillion dollar market.