Fundamental analysis

What counts as a fundamental depends entirely on the asset. For a currency it is rate differentials, inflation, growth, the trade and capital account, and the policy stance behind them. For a share or an index it is earnings, margins, the balance sheet, the sector and the guidance a company issues. For a commodity it is production, inventories, transport and weather. Those are three different evidence bases; what unites them is the structure of the exercise, which compares a price with an estimate assembled from information that does not come off the chart.

The estimate is a model output, and it inherits its assumptions. Two analysts working from the same published data reach different values because they discount at different rates or extrapolate differently, and neither is being careless. Markets also price expectations rather than levels, so the part of a release that moves a price is the surprise against consensus, not the number itself. Official data is revised afterwards, sometimes substantially, which means the figure that moved a market can turn out not to have been the figure at all.

Whether the work times anything is unsettled and has been for decades. One tradition treats fundamentals as the anchor and chart work as the timing mechanism. Another argues that public information is already in the price, so the analysis only pays where an analyst genuinely has better information or a longer horizon than the market is pricing. Both positions are consistent with the observed record, which is why the argument persists rather than resolving, and readers meeting confident claims in either direction are meeting a preference rather than a finding.