I've read her book and overall I think it was informative and easy to follow. I have been using her principles for the last 4 months and find it useful. Just need to keep practicing and the signs will eventually be easier to spot.

You can learn about Wyckoff very cheaply. If you do not have a way to analyze the market and you're just trying to trade a bull flag, backing up action, ABC, two waves, or whatever you want to call it, and you trade it because you think that is thinking probabilities you'd be wrong, and you'd be destined to fail. I believe the Weis Wave is more helpful than VSA. I don't have any experience with SMI, but Wyckoff Analytics is useful if you like the college education course to understand labeling, don't get caught up in the labeling, but it's good to know and understand the terms. Gary Dayton is a good source if you like the down and dirty and direct method; he doesn't cover labeling too much.

I guess we can argue Volume Profile or Market Profile could be hocus pocus too, trading P,D,B patterns.

Volume doesn't lead the price of how traditional TA was taught. Big volume in the direction of the trend, hey, why is it turning around on large volume on climatic action? LMAO

All of these methods could work, but if one speaks to you, roll with it. The trick is to stick with whatever works for you and making it your own. Some need to backtest for a million days, usually nerdy engineers, can only see in black and white, and others don't mind operating in the Gray. You can't test Wyckoff in that manner. There is a format with Wyckoff, but it's not black and white. It's almost like when you're driving a car, and you can sense a vehicle wanting to change lanes before they turn on their blinker or even make a move but change of character or behavior. LMAO

At times it seems the majority of people on FIO are drawn towards indicators or over-complicating trading. Give it a shot, if you like trading, what's it going to hurt. You just learned something about the method in a space you like, trading. The more you look at a chart, the more any of this stuff will make sense to you.

Wyckoff changes the way you think about the market. Larger institutions do not trade the same way as the smaller institutional trend traders(ITS) or retail traders. When retail traders/ITS are selling institutions are accumulating, and when retail traders/ITS are buying institutions are selling distributing. That's the theory in a nutshell, but it's much more than that. If you try and think linearly, you'll get messed up trading Wyckoff, but if you are flexible and can linearly apply the principles, it works.That's if the retail traders really know what they are doing. The majority retail traders in the markets are recklessly trading and are really gamblers and not traders. Coming on many of the trading forums and trying to apply what they are seeing written on these various forums I was one of those dummies . I think it's a secret that no one wants you to know about except the Wyckoffians. Surprised DOW Theory is more published than Wyckoff. If you believe the Market moves in Cycles, Wyckoff is the great place to start, better than DOW Theory in my opinion . However, DOW had a better beard. I mean, Linda Raschke uses Wyckoff so I guess she’s wrong too. LMAO Most of the trading patterns you see fit into Wyckoff, you just have understand where in the cycle even mean reversion trades. All these trading educators are selling you their own fake system not calling it what is really is because if you think they have something special you'll need them for life. Took me a long time to figure that out.

I guess we can argue Volume Profile or Market Profile could be hocus pocus too

Please do not equate Volume Profile with Wyckoff and all the other spurious methodologies out there. Seems like there are more and more posts these days proclaiming that almost any method will work, all that matters is the expertise and psychology of the trader. This is bogus, it is actually quite difficult to find an edge and then execute in a consistent manner.

Instead of Wyckoff, Gann, Fibs and so on one's time would be far better spent learning volume profile, footprints and reading the DOM. But make no mistake, even after diligently learning the aforementioned one will still need to find a specific edge, this can only come after much screen time if at all. This is why most traders fail, they do not treat trading as a time-consuming & serious endeavor.

I heartily suggest the Elite journals for idea generation btw, superb resource, though not all journals are equal.