Even if you spend the next 500 years studying "fundamental" analysis, you will never get any trading edge, assuming your brain (or even your computer) can collect and analyze hundreds of different economic variables and parameters, all in real time, to make trading decisions. As best, fundamental analysis can (sometime) explain why the market moved that way or this way, but it will never give you precise entry/exit points as far as your day to day trading activity is concerned. Total waste of time if you ask me. Just my 2 cents.
I know that. I still want to read a book or two on fundamentals so i am looking for the top 2 to 5 books on this subject. Any recommendations?
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is the classic for fundamental analysis, sets the gold standard as it were, and shows how much work is involved. How to Make Money in Stocks by William O'Neil uses a pared down fundamental approach combined with other factors as part of a system. Interesting read. One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch is on my wish list, seems to offer more practical insights. Also read up whatever you can find by Buffett, apparently he had a different view from Graham on certain items and that made the difference in his success. Can't remember quite what though.
The Intelligent Investor book is a little bit outdated in my opinion, and some of the trading ideas are simply dead wrong. Just an example: Back then in the 70's, the author was strongly convinced that the market was clearly "overvalued". Boy was he seriously wrong, to say the least! But again, trading is not about personal opinions, intuition and hunches, but mathematical and statistical realities.
Let's not confuse trading and investing. How to value companies has not changed, that is what Graham writes about. Buffett formed a different view, this article which I just skimmed, mentions that briefly. I remember reading in greater detail about how Buffett saw things differently from Graham, did not save that article as I don't use fundamentals. http://tradingwithfundamental.blogspot.com/2012/01/warren-buffet-vs-benjamin-graham.html OP wants to read on fundamentals, that is his choice and there is no harm in that. Personally, I'm a trader, read this stuff for the sake of learning, but read more trading related stuff.
I believe, trading, at one point, becomes 90% intuition and 10% statistics and math. The stats come later.
Expectations Investing is a good one. http://www.expectationsinvesting.com/chapter1.shtml Some of Cramer's books do a good job of explaining how the market prices stocks. All of his books are the same, so it doesn't really matter which one. Buffetology is a book by a relative of Buffett, I forget which one. It's actually a pretty good book, it's really by a Buffett groupie who needed the Buffett name on the book. Gives a good reverse-engineering of the Buffett approach. This is a good selection of value/fundamental investing books. http://www.reddit.com/r/SecurityAnalysis/comments/107tal/updated_reading_list/
Sure, just seat in the lotus position, close your eyes, breathe deeply while the music of Ravi Shankar is playing in the background and slowly but surely you will clearly see where the Nikkei futures is headed this month, or even the entire yearly chart of Pork Bellies, complete with its moving averages and all, if you concentrate hard enough. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJkjhNmsoI