What’s The Connection? Stocks And Technical Analysis

In making determinations as to what the stock markets worldwide are going to do in terms of how prices move, there are two distinct schools of thought about analysis of companies and their investment prospects. The typical school of thought, and one that has been successful over the last decades has been the school of fundamental analysis.

This type of analysis looks at the financial prospects of a company, and then looks at their chances of achieving desirable results compared to its competition. On the other side of the fence, there are some in the school of thought involving technical analysis, a largely unscientific but seemingly successful school of thought as well. So, what exactly is the connection between technical analysis and stocks?

If you can believe it, technical analysis is simply the studying of past market trends to make a determination as to what the future of the stock’s price is going to be. But, that still doesn’t answer the whole question - what is the whole connection between technical analysis and stocks? More importantly, how can people think they can predict the price of a stock from looking at charts and graphs and not the financial health or condition of a company?

Well, part of the reason that technical analysis is utilized by some market analysts is that, although one would think that statistically speaking a trading day on the stock market should only be influenced by that day’s events and treated like an independent event, the reality is that most market movement trends over time and the full impact of one event (a downgrade of the stock by an analyst or a movement of earnings higher than expected by the same analysts) is never isolated to one day.

As a result, technical analysis utilizes tons of data including old stock quotes, trading volume charts, and a host of other data, to develop charts and graphs that work to determine exactly how long the impact of a move in a company will persist and impact the stock market trading of a particular issue.

In many cases, a side by side comparison of a fundamental analysis and a technical analysis of the same stock market issue have yielded results in which the technical analysis has been more able to predict the short term ebbs and flows of a particular company. However, the fundamental analysis works on a longer term basis, and so the technical analyst has earned a reputation of being a \”short\” predictor rather than a \”long\” predictor in the markets.

Technical analysis is much more difficult to explain to the layperson due to the incessantly large amount of jargon involved, much of it to describe shapes in graphs and trend lines that exist. An elbow, or a shoulder, or a host of other terms can all be used to describe the same trend in a graph (in this case, a level market, followed by a steep drop, and another leveling off) which can confuse and put off the typical investor from investing in a company.

Overall, those who are familiar with investing still question, \”Technical Analysis vs Stocks…Is there a connection?\” in regard to how can these types of analysis can be used everyday. Honestly, the fact that technical analysis is very subjective to the person who uses it, including being a bit imprecise brings concern. Fortunately, since it has been successful on the whole, this tool is still arguably a good one to use for market analysis.

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