Why it is possible to predict price movement?

Another approach is to isolate the risk you are aim to take (and hence focus on some specific return), this is done through hedging. This is much less obvious than, for example taking simple risk of asset's price appreciation (depreciation) when you short (buy) the asset.

I will give it shot.
Its not impossible to try to guess what a certain human will have for breakfast or which way that one will drive with her/his car to work.
So in general its not impossible to guess what a certain human will do, how she/he will do it and when.
I mean if the contract with the customer or employer says that 8AM to 17PM, with lunch 12-13, that human is at work.
So probably that one is going to actually BE at work that time.
And so, behave in a predictible way.

And the same is true for masses of people.
There are quite good estimations of how people will move if there is a fire.
And thats used to make public buildings like stadions and theaters and so forth.

And SO, and in that way, its possible to predict what markets will do and how they will behave because its people doing it.
If that was not so, it would be impossible to make a advertisment campaign or have a government and so forth.
People do NOT behave randomly given a certain set of conditions.
If there is a fire in a public place with lots of people, NOONE will bring out some hot dogs and beer.

So what does a good trader do?
They, we, learn how the market normally reacts give a certain set of conditions.
Sometimes it doesnt work out of course because maybe there is some fundamental reason we dont know about: Some big Goldman Sachs deal is going down or Blackrock sold some of theyr shares or something like that.
Meaning there is one or many conditions that we could not have taken into account.
But if we have a basic understanding of how the market normally operates, we end up in the green.

Now me personally, i dont factor in those fundamental happenings.
I rely on the technical analysis.

To predict seems to be the fundamental paradigm of everything, the preferred activity of any human being in any environment.
Begining from wether we try to predict everything, but as it occurs with weather forecasts, although we have extremely advanced math models and calculators, we can only rely with some efficency on predicting 2 or 3 days in advance. This is not really a prediction but an anticipation of what will happen at least until the chaos factor will intervene.
Why? Because everything is not casual but driven by a universal code that is driving the whole creation of universe and even human behavior is part of this phenomena: market is a construction of human behaviour.
Chaos is a fundamental part of the scheme, it is the factor that the factor that prevents the pattern from jamming, so also in chaos it is possible to recognize a pattern but it's no more possible to anticipate it because it will occur too fast.
The scheme always leaves a footprint which in a financial environment is given by price action, so if you learn how to read PA you can see the path that price has been following and so you can anticipate the next. Reading PA does not have to do with usual candlestick patterns nor much the less with technical analysis, they are only the result of something that is happening behind the curtains.
So it's not possible to anticipate the future looking at the past, this is just human madness. You have to understand what PA is and then calculate it, it's just a matter of algebraic sum and how to correctly read the result. Last but not least you need to learn how to cope with chaos protecting yourself and your wallet.

This is very interesting. To add to your examples of our inherent ability to recognize patterns and extrapolate predictions of the next, as yet uncompleted, part of the pattern, tones come to mind. Either listening to a melody and anticipating the next likely key tone given the last string of tones or hearing an echo and estimating the likely source, humans have an innate predictive ability.

Our neural processing ability has been used as a template for machine learning models but when it comes to market application of this ability we need look no further than harmonic oscillators.

"Systems that can be modeled as harmonic oscillators are common in Nature. A rocking chair, the movement of the violin strings and a simple mass suspended from the ceiling by a spring are examples where such model can be employed to some extent. In all those cases, if the system is taken out of balance a force begins to act guiding it back. When it returns to the equilibrium configuration, the system still has momentum that causes it to cross the equilibrium. Then, the force that guides it back to equilibrium will be in the opposite direction and the dynamic repeats on [1]. Friction leads the oscillations to be damped and external force may be present. Oscillations observed in price series clearly cannot be fully understood with the harmonic oscillator model. However, return to an optimum fair price, momentum and damping presumably are plausible ingredients in price dynamics." - M.M Garcia - 'Forecast model for financial time series: An approach based on harmonic oscillators'

Good observation. Harmony is a universal concept that informs everything and is known since Pitagora with his
harmony of the spheres. So theorically if you know the melody that price is playing in a given moment you should be able to know next tones but the issue is always the same: it doesn't take count of human factor that is driven by psychology.
Albeit there is a key: you cannot predict what a single man will do next moment in time but you can predict what a group of people will do, so aggregation is predictable because an aggregated group of people follows the same scheme and in that scheme lies harmony until it will show up the chaos factor.

My predecessors already described it good so i am not sure i will add something useful to the thread, but one might find my perspective helpful.

price IS and you can't predict next move with higher % certainty. default is 50%
If you watch it closely and you observe price movement within a candle...is there a way to get a better guess? -->"with higher % certainty"?
You will have to put in some work to get this answer (and not only 1h ).
"Trend is your friend". Trend in 1min, 5min,30min,1h,.... which one? can you profit from every one of them?
I would use another word...flow; fluidness. It doesn't matter who is a reason for price movement(single trader, algoritms, big banks,...). you can see it if you watch it close enough and you have a reference point.
I am sure you know this sentence: "There is no spoon".
Price contains physics values at every moment eventhough it is a sum of machines and people interacting with each other.

It's incredibly easy to predict...
USDMXN target Tuesday High
DD limit 17.38, now watch and enjoy

We are unable to predict price movements with any certainty. Therefore you will have losses (from wrong guesses) and even have many in a row. The 50/50 probability that is often quoted is strictly from the law of large numbers, but not really relevant at a trade by trade level. So the best you can do is formulate a well-tested (demo & backtesting) trading plan with a specific set of trading rules and with a strict risk management settings. Traders typically use some combination of price movement analyses and background economic assessments. Then stick to the plan and not fiddle or ignore as you feel this will work. It probably won't.

it is very possible to predict price movement in real time. you must understand market structure to a great deal and make such knowledge a habit.
the summary of trading is market structure not memorizing price patterns. it is the job of the market to conceal it next move while its in the nature of a good price action trader to reveal it.

market will always appear chaotic but the truth is that, the chaos has been engineered to conceal structure.

BAM! Target is eliminated!

Most are based on the assumption that past price action can be a prediction of future price action. Of course it cannot with any certainty. However it's all about improving the odds in your favour. So traders often use multiple analyses looking for confluences and confirmations to make trades combined with tight risk management.