In making determinations as to what the stock markets worldwide are going to do in terms of how prices move, there are two distinct schools of thought about analysis of companies and their investment prospects. The typical school of thought, and one that has been successful over the last decades has been the school of fundamental analysis.

This type of analysis looks at the financial prospects of a company, and then looks at their chances of achieving desirable results compared to its competition. On the other side of the fence, there are some in the school of thought involving technical analysis, a largely unscientific but seemingly successful school of thought as well. So, what exactly is the connection between technical analysis and stocks?

Technical analysis is the study of past market trends to help forecast what future stock prices will be. However, this doesn’t explain the entire connection between technical analysis and stocks. Needless to say, what makes people conclude that the price of a stock is determined by looking at just data and not take into consideration of the overall condition or financial state of a company?

The primary reason that technical analysis is used by some market analysts is because it can be used subjectively. The analysts can downgrade a stock and or anticipate higher earnings. One would think that from a statistical standpoint, a regular trading day would only be swayed by the daily activities and independent of anything else that has previously occurred. The truth is that over time market movements occur and trends develop. The movements made and the events that occur are not really isolated at all to one day, but are usually cumulative over a period of time.

Therefore, technical analysis makes use of a lot of diverse data, including trading volume charts, old stock quotes, and much more. This data is then in turn used to look at particular issues which help in developing graphs and charts. These then help in determining the length of the impact of a move in a company will endure and also the outcome that it has on stock market trading.

In many cases, a side by side comparison of a fundamental analysis and a technical analysis of the same stock market issue have yielded results in which the technical analysis has been more able to predict the short term ebbs and flows of a particular company. However, the fundamental analysis works on a longer term basis, and so the technical analyst has earned a reputation of being a “short” predictor rather than a “long” predictor in the markets.

Due to complexity of the language and terminology used technical analysis can be quite off putting to laypeople who may not understand this verbiage. Since graphs and trend lines involve this terminology and it can sometimes be ambiguous. Many different terms can be used to denote the same trend on a graph and this can cause confusion of the typical investor who may want to invest. For example, a shoulder or an elbow can denote the same thing in a trend on a graph. Talking about leveling and drops in regard to market fluctuations can be quite intimidating to a general investor.

In conclusion, the question still remains, “What’s the connection between technical analysis and stocks?”, how is it determined and on what basis? How can these tools be used daily and made easier to comprehend. Although, technical analysis is not as accurate and can be very subjective, it has been successful so it makes it hard to dispute that it is still a viable tool used in market analysis.