100% agree mate, the bots are programmed by years of technical analysis, patterns and crowd behaviour, therefore they continue to be self fulfilling. Retail is just noise at the periphery, but it helps to provide the liquidity needed by the smart money to enter and exit at key points. Retail don't create these moves, but they certainly react to it and as such are an essential component to ensuring it executes "correctly".
Quite interesting the crowd behaviour and psychology behind it all. This recent pullback was a good example - last week when I said the technicals indicate a sharp correction is imminent I was called out for being a downramper and accused of being a jealous non-holder with nothing good to say. Those who have been around a bit longer will know that is complete nonsense. But the general feeling of most on here was that the "fundamentals are too strong", and PLS will just continue upwards "to the moon" as it is printing cash. That was a pretty good sign to me that we were probably due for a "healthy correction" as the big money tends to have a knack of pulling the rug out just when the masses least expect it.
Following the drop on Monday I saw several posters saying that they were out and had gone to cash around $4.74 only to watch it retrace on the B wave back to $5! Caught out again by the big money!
Then as some of them no doubt bought back in again at $5-5.10 the smart money strikes again and down she goes...
Makes me laugh when the staunch "I only invest on fundamentals" crew poke fun at TA, yet we see this play out over and over again. Sure with a long term view the fundamentals suffice - but hey that's why I bought my long term holding under 50c...
Elliott wave and fibonacci numbers are just fancy names given to observed patterns over millennia (they are mentioned in the bible and before that the book of enoch, and were clearly well known to much older civilizations) and I know many think it is bullshit and smoke and mirrors, but if you actually delve deeper into what drives it, it is impossible to deny that it applies to everything around us, not least the stock market. Our DNA is literally built from these mathematical ratios. Even the fact that a certain proportion of people will see it and understand it, vs a proportion that will denounce it as nonsense is all a part of why it works and will always continue to.
(20min delay)