Do you think the technical analysis of price action in forex is just a pseudoscience?

No, the problem’s something else, it is with the expectations of the guy sitting between keyboard and chair. Trading is not intuitive. The intuitive-led approach of most beginners is to believe that they need to predict future prices to make money in trading, so they expect analysis methods to help them achieve that goal. Neither technical analysis or the specialization in price action trading, nor a fundamental one or anything else, can do that.

Technical analysis is a tool to find market situations in which a bet is worthwhile. For a bet to be worth taking, I don’t need to know where the price will go. I just need to know where this bet doesn’t make sense anymore (position A), where the price has a certain chance to go (position B) and that the distance to B is several times greater than the distance to A, so that I can make more money with the bet going right than I lose in case of it going wrong.

One way to do this is to find levels where the price has a history of reversing. For example, repeatedly tested floors or ceilings of a range or other statistically recurring patterns. As for example in this picture.

Price Action can now be used to better estimate the probabilities that the price really reverses there, by deducing the herd behaviour of the people behind the price movements from, for example, the decreasing momentum, the emergence of counter-movements or the struggle between two price levels and the renewed emergence of momentum when breaking through this barrier.

A price action trader, would, for example, pay some attention to the wicks as a means to show a rejection of a higher price, but also how the price actually moves (in a live chart).

See it as means to gauge force (conviction) or uncertainty in the price movement. Of course, alone this is useless, a prediction it is not and it has nothing to do with telling the target. It is only a means to increase the probability of a trade to work out.

Please take note that I’m writing from the point of view of a rather short-term currency trader. I have no experience with hourly candlestick charts or something like that.