Fundamental Analysis

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. 

1. Economy Analysis
2. Industry Analysis
3. Company Analysis

Economy Analysis -  this is the analysis of the annual reports published by the Central Bank of a country and other relevant incidents, events and transactions that might affect the economy.

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. 

Portfolio

What is 'Portfolio'?

A Portfolio in general means a collection. A group of something and such. In the Stock Market, your collection of the total investment can be referred to as the Portfolio. But more commonly the collection or the group of invested stocks by you is called as your 'Portfolio'. Your portfolio could consist of a single stock up to a maximum decided by you.

How to manage your 'Portfolio'?

Portfolio management simply refers to the process of making decisions as to the appropriate investment mix, the potential performance of the investments, managing risks and meeting your investment objectives. 

Diversification

The main problem with any type of investment is the certain degree of 'risk' associated with it. Risk could be either favorable or unfavorable outcomes that were not foreseen. There's NO term called 'ZERO RISK', because that is practically unavoidable not to face a risk. But there is a term called 'minimizing risk' or 'managing risk', because that is practically possible. So how to minimize the risk of your overall investment? One word answer. 'Diversification'. Diversification in simple means investing in more than one or two stocks. A more advanced explanation would be, a risk management technique that utilizes a mix of investments in your portfolio. 

Let's see how Diversification reduces the risk of the investment. This could be quoted with a popular proverb, "don't put all your eggs in one basket". If you drop the basket by mistake all the eggs are gone. But if you had the eggs in two baskets and if one basket falls and breaks all the eggs, there's still the other basket with a bunch of saved eggs. If you understand this story, you've understood what diversification is really about. It' that simple. But most of us tend to neglect the small facts and go for big calculations, predictions, equations and stuff. But sticking to the basics will not fail you at all.

So it is said that you should diversify your portfolio in order to minimize your risk. Say you have 10 stocks and if five of them go down, there's still hope with the rest five stocks. With diversified portfolio it's very hard to loose the whole game. But if you have just merely a stock or two your chances of failing are pretty high. Investing is a lesser number of stocks is called as 'Under Diversification'.

Over Diversification

This is the other extreme of diversification. Fearing the risk, the investor tends to diversify his portfolio as much as possible. But this is not good at all. Yes, over diversification could bring your risk to a very low level, but the chances of making profits out of these stocks reduce to a great extent. Because of monetary constraints a single stock in an over diversified portfolio will only have a small quantity of shares. Thus it will be very hard to gain a proper profit when all the stock market fees, brokerage fees and other taxes add up to the cost of buying and selling. So it is not advisable to have a HUGE collection of stocks either. The generally accepted number of stocks that should be present in a good portfolio would be 20. But this will vary immensely based on the value of your total investment. But it is advisable that you don't exceed 20 stocks when buying shares. 

(this is not buy/sell/hold recommendation.)