> Why does everyone naively try to predict price? No ‘traders’ are interested in predicting it - what traders do is identify good locations to enter or exit the market.

I agree.

I've built many systems in this area, but it wasn't until I started working in the Indian market (>10 yrs ago) that it became abundantly clear that trying to calculate the long/shorts signals using historical (/time series) data was a waste of time. (And yet my primary role was to provide tools that did exactly that).

Back then, in the indian market, you could see that most of the stocks, although skyrocketing upwards, all followed the slow vs fast moving averages to buy and sell! Back then, they weren't looking at RSI, stochastics, support lines, etc, etc. It was crazily predictable...but over time it was really interesting to see it become more haphazard and like western stocks. That is, the fundamentals came into play and as you say, the traders began to use other metrics to buy and sell.