There’s money to be made alright, but I don’t think most retail traders are in the position to do that.
Technical analysis might as well be astrology. It treats tickers as isolated when in reality ETFs and growth of any individual stock in an ETF affects the flow in and out of other ETFs. When ETFs purchase stock due to an increase in value, they seek most liquid constituents first, and eventually rebalance. All these create feedback loops. The flow across the ETFs drives 80% of volume.
People would have higher performance if they learned about any particular sector, its movement and long term trends.
Retail has a lot of flexibility but people focus on trading over days instead of understanding trends and events of tomorrow, next year and the next decade.
Retail options “traders” barely understand the mechanics of at all, let alone the disadvantage they are in. They buy overpriced options with absurd premium that tanks during the chop induced by MMs. They don’t understand how MMs move/manipulate(not in the illegal sense)/shape the market to avoid losing money — they wouldn’t be in this position if they lost money. They just copy trades from traders on discord and hope to make some money.
ETFs are a great way to make money in terms of risk exactly of their rebalancing mechanics.
Everyone doesn’t have to beat the market, just beating inflation and leaving it in the bank is an improvement for the average person. Yes it won’t make people rich tomorrow, but they will be in a better situation next year or the one after than today.