Open trading account 
Prices go up because someone (a group of) agrees to pay higher price.. It is mechanisms behind so called momentum. When "crowds" gather together and want something (whatever reason), and if they believe they would benefit from it (greed component), prices tend to move for extended periods of time. And vice versa.
If you can determine when some particular group would sell or buy (e.g. have a some information - signal), you can benefit from this belief. markets usually have weak signals as they have many concurrent groups with many different beliefs. Usually most equity markets are weakly mean reverting (one group often changed by another one) and FX markets - weakly momentum (with HFT probably no longer).
So, forget overcomplication, we basically have only 2 strategies - momentum (buy with "crowd") or mean reverting (casino like - sell to "crowd").
In purely rational world there would be no trading, as John who buys from Bob will always think "why Bob sells? maybe he knows something I don't, I'd rather not to buy" and Bob would think "why John wants to buy? he expects prices to rise, I'd rather not to sell".
As this micro-story tells, in order to make some money in trading, somewhere should exists a liquidity provider ("crowd") which due to lack of information would agree to "transfer" the money to the information holder. It is probably why retail brokers never share proven quantitative information. Not always a case, as most brokers and funds also don't know what they do.
If you can determine when some particular group would sell or buy (e.g. have a some information - signal), you can benefit from this belief. markets usually have weak signals as they have many concurrent groups with many different beliefs. Usually most equity markets are weakly mean reverting (one group often changed by another one) and FX markets - weakly momentum (with HFT probably no longer).
So, forget overcomplication, we basically have only 2 strategies - momentum (buy with "crowd") or mean reverting (casino like - sell to "crowd").
In purely rational world there would be no trading, as John who buys from Bob will always think "why Bob sells? maybe he knows something I don't, I'd rather not to buy" and Bob would think "why John wants to buy? he expects prices to rise, I'd rather not to sell".
As this micro-story tells, in order to make some money in trading, somewhere should exists a liquidity provider ("crowd") which due to lack of information would agree to "transfer" the money to the information holder. It is probably why retail brokers never share proven quantitative information. Not always a case, as most brokers and funds also don't know what they do.