In a nutshell, thats really all there is to trading.
The problem that people face is establishing how to manage trades, where to cut losers, how to move stops, should they scale in and out etc. If you build up this knowledge through experience and trial and error, you cant really pass it on, if you determine this more formally, then youre not really inclined to share mainly because it takes a lot of work, and secondly because it only works for specific set ups, or risk tolerance etc, and therefore isnt really of general use, change one tiny element, and the whole house of cards falls down.
There are certainly methods by which random entries can be traded profitably, and I spent my first 3 years of trading doing exactly that, but of course, with a little analysis, you soon realise that the addition of a directional bias improves performance significantly. Timing the entry and exit results in yet further gains, but you have to have a solid foundation of which these techniques can be layered.
The irony of all this is that the majority of methods that are discussed publically are of course nothing more than random chance, and many of the shorter term systems are significantly worse ! If people realised that they where dealing with random chance, rather than a misplaced belief in prediction, they’d probably stand a chance at establishing the correct psychology required to trade profitably, and it may well be, that the incorrect belief that these systems are somehow predictive, is the reason that most ultimately fail.
I firmly believe that its practically impossible to trade profitably without an understanding of the role of random probability, and how this potentially impacts on trading performance. I’d probably go as far as to say that the study of random entries and exits are a much better place to start than learning systems and methods.