@Just messing!
ICT methodology works best to reflexive intraday moves, thresholds and patterns... pretty much support and resistance. As in cause + effect i.e. short-term institutional conducting orderly business - repeatable, reproducible, predictive. Just noise to OTF.
Michael is still live-streaming calling a gap between a candle close and candle open a volume imbalance! 😅Reading candlestick PA has to be the most subjective of all the technical analysis subsets.
Simons, employed a "monolithic trading system" that relied on processing massive amounts of data to identify non-random price movements also, but was way ahead on the curve with math and data science.
I agree markets are Markovian, where a system or process in the future state depends solely on the present state, not on past history. This is where a lot of back-testing edge degrades.
You nailed it here - "But you can understand where the big money is positioned and what conditions are already set before price moves."
Reading and tracking the traces is a great skill to learn!