How Random is Random?

[GeorgeCh]

Every day, traders ask themselves, over and over again, the same question - can I, or can I not, predict what the market is going to do?

If we assume the random walk theory to be true, then markets are random and unpredictable.

However, we also know that markets are driven by human traders (or algorithms programmed by human traders) conditioned to response to price behavior stimuli.

Is it a contradiction, then to state that while we cannot predict the behavior of a given instrument over a 24-hour period, we can still identify common stimuli (patterns) and predict the short-term (minutes) response of traders to them with greater than 50% accuracy (50% being the baseline "luck" result)?

Posting it here, since this is the only Forex forum I've found so far which isn't full of knee-jerk responses like "the trend is your friend" and "you can't make more than 10% a year because non-leveraged products never make more than 10% a year unless you're Warren Buffett."

[dirk]

The markets are not random, they are cyclicals and also have memory of the past......