The truth is that technical analysis has been prostituted by many people who don't study enough. When I studied technical analysis, I got the idea that the goal was to find patterns that have happened in the past. There are good books that explain well the relationship between these patterns and the behavior of traders. What happens today is an aberration, because people are looking for these patterns and do not even apply the basic principles of them. For example, it is normal to see people drawing patterns in which the candlestick chart is even identical but then they forget to look at the volume and time frame of the pattern. Another common mistake is to draw support/resistance with only one or two points, when the books say that the minimum is three touches. These are just a few examples, but many more exist. Personally, I think the simpler the better, nowadays I only use the 50 and 200 daily moving averages and a border between bear/bull market.