Absolutely false on its face.
All trade is by definition positive sum, and a market is merely the aggregation of all trades. This arises because the preferences of individual participants are not monolithic.
The whole anti-TA strain I can understand is very compelling from a sense of misguided skepticism and not wanting to be made a fool, but all of these knee jerk non-criticisms transparently come out of a lack of understanding of what TA even is in the first place.
Imagine this scenario:
10 men are locked in a room. They are given different quantities of 2 assets each. They start exchanging those 2 assets among them, effectively creating a 'market' and determining a 'price' of asset A measured in asset B and viceversa.
This price is recorded day by day, and a graph drawn on the wall of the room.
Now, as times goes on, 9 of these 10 men start seeing things in the graph. They seems to
fool themselves into thinking that somewhat future prices are determined by previous ones. They take rules and compasses and start identifying 'trends' and 'patterns' in the graph. They think: "price has gone up for the last 3 days, it is more probable that it will go up today, instead of going down". They completely forgot the base mechanics, as you recall correctly: trades and trades alone determine price.
The 10th man, more wise, don't believe this mumbo jumbo. He understand the mechanics. He also know, now, that another mechanic has been added to the game: beliefs.
So at the start of the day he buy a bit of B,
fooling the others into thinking: "see? what did i told you? trend is up". And they buy, and buy...
It is at that point that our trading hero sell.
So, while these 9 men think they are smart because they can see 2 moving averages cross, the other one
fool them. A lot.
After a year the room is unlocked. Every pieces of A and B are in the pockets of our hero. The others pockets are empty.
Here endeth the lesson.
That's not a lesson, that's reinventing the wheel from scratch on the basis of no direct knowledge of the subject, to create some perverse "lifeboat ethics" thought experiment deceptively designed to vaguely produce the outcome that you want.
The real way to learn about this subject is to learn about this subject, and then produce critiques later from a position of knowledge instead of a position of sophomoric generality.
Here's a lesson for you: the way that you define what a market is at the beginning is a cargo-cult definition that does not subsume the primary conceptual features of what a market really is, but just shows the consequent trappings of how a market looks. And at the very beginning of the second paragraph you just go ahead and assume what you're trying to prove, which again, is a problem that won't go away here.
