What is Fundamental Analysis?
In the simplest form 'Fundamental Analysis' is the process of analyzing the financial reports of an economy, industry or a company. Since this is the Stock Market, it's always about the companies. As always the aim of Fundamental analysis is to forecast the future price movements of the company and also a long term investor may look at features such as stability, growth etc.
Unlike Technical Analysis which determines price fluctuations based on the real-time information like price trends, charts etc., Fundamental analysis is concerned on more solid grounds. Those include, company profitability, company performance (quarters, annually, semi-annually), goodwill, stability, management etc.
Criteria for Fundamental Analysis
As the above picture shows, there are three main parts of Fundamental analysis.
- Economy Analysis
- Industry Analysis
- Company Analysis
Industry Analysis - this is the analysis of the industry a specific company is in. For an example a hospital belongs to the healthcare industry and almost all the events that occur within the industry will have an impact on the said company.
Company Analysis - this is the analysis of the company you have or hoping to invest in. This might look as if the most relevant analysis for an investment, but the other two are as equally important.
Company Analysis
Analysis a specific company can be done in many ways. The more analyse the better chances you have in making a sound decision. Company analysis can be discussed in following topics.
Financial Analysis.
This is the most common for of Fundamental analysis. In-fact most people think this is the only form of Fundamental analysis. But this is just a small part of a bigger chain. Financial analysis includes the analysis of financial statements, reports, past financial data and so on. This is purely of financial nature. This makes more sense since at the end of the day the financial situation of a company is what really decides the price of the share tomorrow. In financial analysis we will mostly look for information like 'debtors, creditors, acid ratios, current ratios, price earning ratio, total revenue, total current and non current expenditure, total debt capital, total equity capital, gearing ratio, liquidity, price, taxes, dividends, cash flows, working capital management etc, and the list goes on. However these information will directly relate to the price of a share of the company.
Management
Another important aspect of the company analysis would be the 'management' or the board of directors of the company who actually makes the decisions on behalf of the company. A 'good' management will give a more positive outlook for the company and vice versa.
Business Plan
This is the document that provides all stakeholders the information relating to the company as to what it does, what are it's objectives, what are the growth prospects and so forth. A sound business plan with sound goals and objectives and a good management to support that will give the investor confidence to believe the company would perform well in the future.
All these put together, Fundamental Analysis will become a much stronger tool for your decision making process.
Fundamental analysis is the cornerstone of investing. In fact, some would say that you aren't really investing if you aren't performing fundamental analysis.Because the subject is so broad, however, it's tough to know where to start. There are an endless number of investment strategies that are very different from each other, yet almost all use the fundamentals.
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