Technical analysis and fundamental analysis are two main schools of thought when it comes to analyzing the financial markets. Technical analysis looks at the price movement of a security and uses this data to attempt to predict future price movements. Fundamental analysis instead looks at economic and financial factors that influence a business. Much of the criticism of technical analysis is focused on the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which states that any past trading information is already reflected in the price of the stock. Taken to the extreme, the “strong form efficiency” hypothesis states that both technical and fundamental analyses are useless because all information in the market is accounted for in a stock’s price.

This thinking is explained in detail in books like A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel, which states that an investor is better at guessing than stock picking. So therefore, our Company Fundamental analysts try to determine a the financial market value by looking at its income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. In financial terms, an investor tries to measure a the market's intrinsic value by discounting the value of future projected cash flows to a net present value. A stock price that trades below the market's intrinsic value is typically considered a good investment opportunity and vice versa.