Exact, because 99% of movements are random, 1% (or less) is the inefficiency that traders/systems aim to trade.
Im sure that markets change and at the same time they stay the same.
To be honest, knowing the why and how is beyond my pay grade.
I think markets might change as they become more or less liquid - in highly liquid markets there are more participants willing to trade at all prices - not so with less liquid ones
It’s probably why such large moves in bitcoin - but as more money moves into it those moves will be less.
Also I do believe the HFT boys have had a lot to do with things.
Then there are other things like political and economic backdrop or market microstructure.
I’d love to get my hands on research as to why things change but it’s hardly easy to find.
If I was more of a quant maybe I could do it myself - maybe I’ll leave it to you?
All I really know is that markets have been breaking out from tight consolidations for a long time now - and until that changes I think I can still make money.
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Truth on both sides here. As a person who has been relentlessly working on building an automated trading system for years, I can tell you without doubt that varying market conditions are the death of trading systems. I have spent so many hours watching something that works in 2020 fail in 2006 and vice versa. The trick is finding patterns and triggers that work across varying market conditions and timeframes.
Everyone approaches this differently, but I like to build functions around indicator and oscillator checks that feed in external variable values. That lets you take several of those external variable values and run ranges of possibilities through thousands or millions of permutations using optimization passes against decades of tick data to find the needles in the haystack. MT4 lets you do this natively if you feed it good tick data. “Show me which trading hours vs. which MA period vs. which difference in value between the outermost 2nd deviation bollinger bands vs. which increase in pips for those bands during a single period returns the most profit across 15 years”… or anything you can imagine really. When I first fully grasped all the possibilities it made my head explode.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy or common to succeed here, but IMO you can always build a better mouse trap, so why not stick yer brain to it! 
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