Until relatively recently fundamental analysis, or looking at past political and economic events to help them predict price movements in the underlying currencies they traded, is how most traders arrived at trading decisions.
However, fundamental analysis requires a trader to absorb lots of diverse information from many sources and considerable knowledge to interpret it accurately. Couple this with basic disagreements as to what information is important and what weight to assign it and you can begin to see why this method took enormous resources and time. Two characteristics not commonly associated with the individual investor.
The end result was that for years currency trading was the exclusive playground of large banks or other institutions with the resources to accomplish this type of analysis
Now, the rise of computing power and the proliferation of electronic information sources have lead to a fundamental shift in the way most traders analyze the Forex market.
Today most traders employ another, more automated, form of analysis known as technical analysis. This involves the combined charting of real-time and historical price movement data of currencies. Today this is mostly accomplished using computers which have the ability to do the sometimes complex math quickly in near real-time.
Technical analysis really boils down to simply taking the over one hundred years worth of recorded historical price data available from the foreign currency market and running it through a computerized charting application to look for patterns and trends.
Once these patterns or trends are identified they must be quantified in there ability to predict price moves in a particular direction. Once done, a trader can then look at the manner in which a currency's price is currently moving and compare this to similar past patterns to predict the future direction of movement.
So, while technical analysis still requires skill, experience, and judgment the fact that it is more automated and less subjective than the research involved in fundamental analysis contributes to it's popularity. The debate over which method is better will probably never be resolved, but most traders feel that technical analysis is easier to learn and master.
There are three underlying principles one must be familiar with to fully understand technical analysis.
First, there are many factors, such as political or economic events, that will produce price movement in a particular currency pair. However, these factors, or reasons, are not what's important to technical analysis, but rather the price movement itself.
Second, technical analysis assumes that pricing moves follow a trend that can be discerned by tracking the patterns that emerge over time in the market.
Finally, the trends and patterns that emerge from historical charting and analysis of price will also be reflected in future price action movements. This is because, in the view of the technical analyst, the trading psychology of humans remains for the most part constant over time. So market participants will react in similar fashion to similar news in the future the same as they have in the past.
This "wisdom of crowds" or at least the predictability of crowds is dismissed by followers of the fundamental analysis approach. They hold to their belief that a deep understanding of the factors that affect pricing and not a reliance on patterns is the only way to produce reliable long term results.
In spite what the fans of fundamental analysis say the majority of traders today rely almost entirely on a some form of technical analysis for trading currency.
No system, whether based on fundamental and technical analysis, can accurately predict price movements every time but a good technical trader who takes the time to learn a sound methodology can do quite well.
