I've been pondering the explosion of technical trading in today's markets; with a saturation of programs offering to "teach the trade" over the last ten years...

When you listen to LONG term technical traders, like Louise Yamada, she comments that she's seeing many of the patterns failing.

With the emergence of "black boxes" and HFT, programmed by whom we must assume are well aware of the technicals; would it not be easy for the fiats to paint technical patterns; knowing they'll induce a certain trading behavior; only to capture those lemmings by whipsawing them out of their trade??? Perhaps evidence of this theorem would be the performance of GS; reporting a loss on ONE trading day in Q3. Or, the inverted H-S pattern that everyone in the world was waiting to complete and the technical traders assumed would fail because "it was too obvious"...

Another example could be the latest "Rosen Market Timing Letter"; where he's using technicals and "behaviorism" to support an expanded flat correction in gold down below $700.... This seems absurd, as the physical metal would disappear at price levels far above that level; and yet this fundamental is not considered.

Could it be that the lemmings include contrarians, since the majority think they can predict the market with technicals and "behaviourism"?