4DS chart, page-3626

You can't divide movements into three and assign equally probability to each, statistics don't work that way. Movements can have different amplitude, and you are lumping all upward or downward movements together - so you could equally treat sideways movements as movements either upward or downward with an amplitude of zero, treat half as upwards and half as downwards. Having done that, assuming the amplitude of all upward movements has the same average as the amplitude of all downward movements, the odds of the next movement being up or down are NOT 50/50. The ASX has an overall, long-term upward trend of about 5% annualised return. Again, assuming equal amplitudes of up vs down movements, that's equivalent to a 5% better chance of up than down. So without doing any TA or FA your odds are about 52.5/47.5. Ideally, some good TA or FA gives you an edge on those odds, allowing you to "beat the market". But even without that you should be making money, unless you're using some investing strategy that performs worse than average. Statistically speaking, though, for every dollar gained "beating the market" there is a dollar lost by someone, somewhere under-performing.