Thursday 23 August 2007

Fundamentalism?

In the land of stock and share trading, someone who uses a company's results, sales figures, P/e ratio, etc is said to use the fundamentals to make their decision, whereas someone who just uses the price and volume charts for short term trades is said to be a technical trader. I think the same split can be seen in Bet exchange trading, e.g. someone who scalps the horse racing, 10 minutes before the off, without care or concern who is racing, who trained who etc but just the prices and volumes, as they move, shift and do their merry dance is a technical trader. Whereas, someone taking a longer duration position, may study the race form and decide that horse X is a steamer and so put on an early back, then come back later and close the trade with a (hopefully) short priced lay.

What would interest me is finding out how many people trade technically and how many use the fundamentals or both and on what markets. My gut feel, after speaking with a few people, is that horse racing before the off has a number of technical traders but the other markets predominantly require some fundamentals, e.g. starting off with an idea of who will win/score first goal/lead the field and then possibly scalp the prices in-play or just hold back and close the trade at a certain point. I'd be interested to hear what you guys do.

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