Geoff,
I am a short-term trader, so when I say a stock is about to "move", I am talking about in matter of seconds and minutes where I must make a trading decision. My positions don't last for more than a few days. So, we may be talking from a different time perspective.
Regardless, I disagree that we can't reliably predict future price movements. Why do you think God created charts? Granted, it's not perfect. God went even further and gave us stop-loss orders 'cause he knows we make mistakes.
The longer the time frame, the harder it is to predict using charts. That's why I concentrate on short-term. It's similar to predicting the weather, they can predict tomorrow's weather more accurately than next week's.
My opinion on long-term investing is that it is long-term gambling. It's ironic that the general public believes short-term trading is akin to gambling and investing is relatively safe. Inexperienced short-term traders, without a doubt, start out losing money, but some eventually learn to do it successfully. Investors toil for years without making any consistent improvements. Their results (annual percentage gains) looks like results from a random number generator, including negative numbers. Peter Lynch's and John Templeton's are statistical anomalies as a result of luck and good timing. If I ask a thousand people to flip a quarter ten times, I will probably find one or two who will get "heads" nine out of ten times. That doesn't make them special.
Fundamental analysis that the brokerage houses sell to the public in relation to predicting price movements is no better than random chance. I can't think of any other profession where one's experience has no bearing on their performance.
Can you imagine being a doctor, a mechanic, an engineer, where you simply do not get better or maybe worse with experience?
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