Fundamental Analysis or Technical Analysis?

One of my worst trades ever was buying Home Depot stock. I had read a lot of books about fundamental analysis. I learned how to look at PE ratios and book value and a host of other metrics to see if a stock was a good buy. I opened a brokerage account and I thought I was ready.
It was the late 1990s and everything was going up in the US markets. Home Depot announced earnings that beat the estimates, the stock jumped up, I bought, the stock went down. It just started to steadily decline as I watched day after day waiting for those great earnings to send it soaring. Everything else was going up. Companies that lost money every quarter were soaring, but Home Depot, with its great earnings, continued to drop. I eventually sold, losing money, but gaining knowledge.
I lost money in the 1990s while everything soared. I put everything on hold and bought: Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets by John J. Murphy. I read that and several other books on technical analysis before buying stocks again. That is when I became a trader.
Here is what I learned from those books:
Fundamental analysis tells you what everybody should think about a stock.
Technical analysis tells you what everybody really thinks about a stock.
Think about that for a minute. What really matters when you buy a stock? Do you want to own a stock that you think is great because of its great fundamentals, but nobody else cares about? No, you want to own the stock that doesn't make any money, has bad management, poor future prospects, and the whole rest of the world wants to own.
People are not always rational. The dot com boom and crack up proved that people are not always rational in their investments.
You may argue that those bad dot com companies did crash and burn in the end as fundamental analysis would predict. Yes, but when that happened, technical analysis was predicting the same thing. The difference is that technical analysis was right up and down, not just half the time.
There are a lot of tools for technical analysis, but I would advise you to stick with the basics of chart pattern analysis, candlesticks, MACD, stochastics, and maybe rsi. Too many indicators can over confuse the situation and make things worse. Pick the ones you like and stick with them.
Happy trading.