Fundamental analysis looks at the fortunes of a company that issues common stock that individuals and financial institutions may purchase. Fundamental analysis concerns itself with a company’s balance sheet, competition from other companies in the same business, product launches, costs of inputs to production such as raw materials and labor, the effect of macroeconomic trends on the company in question, and really anything that concerns the current and future health of a given company.

Notice that I did not mention the price of a company’s stock, whether it is high or low, trending up or trending down, etc.

Technical analysis looks at nothing except the price of a company’s stock and hundreds of different indicators that have to do with people buying and selling shares of the stock. It is concerned with quantifying all aspects of market activity surrounding the stock, as opposed to the fortunes of the company that issues the stock. Technical analysis in its most basic form has to do with charts of price movements of individual stocks as well as groups of stocks and stock indexes. In addition to raw movements, ‘technical indicators’, often obscure and arcane, have been invented. Technicians use them to attempt to further analyse aspects of market moves, all in the hope of forecasting future price movements with some amount of consistency, through a combination of these indicators.

So if you want to make money in the market, whether through buying stock, buying stock options, ETFs or mutual funds, is technical or fundamental analysis more reliable? Many experts think that one should be aware of both the fundamentals and the technical side of a company and its stock chart.

At the same time, it is true that many experts in fundamental analysis concern themselves only with how well a company is doing when determining whether or not to buy stock or a stock option contract in it, and think that charts are useless tools for the task. Also, many pure technicians have no interest at all in the business of the company whose chart they are analyzing; they think that signals from the charts are sufficient to determine whether the stock should be bought or not.

The argument as to the relative merits of technical analysis versus fundamental analysis will probably never be conclusively resolved. But at least now you’ll hopefully have a handle on the difference between the two.

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