When you're just starting out trading, there's a good chance that someone will shove technical analysis down your throat before you've even figured out what the heck you're doing in the first place. The thing that really bothers me about the way that technical analysis is presented is what it does to the way that people think or, more accurately, what it lets them get away with not thinking about. You don't have to ask what dynamic you're actually trying to capture, why prices might move in your favor, or what edge you could plausibly have. You just memorize patterns and wait for shapes to appear on a chart. What makes it worse is that most people consuming this stuff never stop to ask whether any of it actually holds up. And a lot of it probably can't even be properly tested, because the rules are never defined clearly enough to test in the first place. There's always a discretionary escape hatch. The frustrating part is that you don't realize any of this at the start. It feels like you're learning something. It has jargon, it has structure, it looks like a skill being built. But the more seriously you eventually take trading, the more you dig into what could actually make sense, the more you realize how much of that early foundation you have to actively unfuck. A big part of the learning curve is going back and unfucking what you absorbed when you didn't know better.