The common belief is that it is possible to have reasoning about price direction at any moment. At least this is seen as a final point of your progress if you're into chart interpreting. People expect that if you're good, you have a vision "up or down" at any moment.
But from what I've learned: you, in fact, can have this kind of answer only in a particular moment of time, where the local situation loses stability and undergo some critical shift. This is just a quick moment, and it is usually wrong to be too fast or too slow using it. After that moment everything happens very fast because next moment the whole market sees this piece of information and act accordingly. So you have to enter just in time.
So I don't know how people can have an opinion about price movement direction at any moment of time. It looks to me that this kind of opinion on average will be extremely poor. If you want a quality of decision good enough to bet your money on it, you have to accept that good enough reasoning will appear only in sparse moments. The rest of the time, 99% of it, you just don't have enough information to answer "up or down" question.
I suspect, that many people just can't accept the fact that they there's no answer 99% of the time. People just like having an opinion. It may be ok to discuss "up or down" just for fun, but if you want to bet your money on your opinion, that's different. You have to understand the level where "for fun" becomes "good enough to bet money", and to have the courage to admit that this level is very high.
So many players are over-concentrated on "up or down" question because they believe that this is what the game is about. And they make decisions not having enough information to do so on a decent level. This situation looks like an opportunity. You just have to understand where a massive failure of that kind of players happens.