Wayne....yes I have been obsessive/compulsive watching and thinking too much. Ive been like this for a long time and I'm sure its an illness.
But anyhooo...I basically agree with you about price movement as reactionary to peoples observations. Of course there are market conditions that push or pull on price levels, but since its impossible to know when an event will occur that moves a price, that in itself adds yet another random element.
Coin toss analogy fits perfectly in price movement. Here's what I'm thinkin...if you watch the bid/ask/last and slow it down in your mind, it would mimic a coin toss. Flip the coin..the buyer hits the ask. Flip again...the seller hits the bid. Nine flips in a row where the buyer hits the ask, and you've got a higher price. (if the asks dry up for a nano second and the ask price clicks up a tick) Does the next flip have a higher probability of a seller hitting the bid, since there has been so many buyers hitting the ask in a row ? No. So this is the definition of "random", where the next flip has a 50/50 probability regardless of the prior flip. Also important to realize, is that there will be "patterns" that occur in the coin toss sequences. If you plotted on graph paper the coin toss results, where everytime it came up heads you drew a line that went up one tick and tails went down one tick....then you would see ranging patterns and trending patterns varying in time duration.

TIMWAR