Good book for learning about fundamental analysis?

Quote from fatrat:

I don't know all that much about reading and coming up with a valuation for a company. Can someone recommend some texts for a guy who didn't go to business school, but instead was an engineering monkey?
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From an engineer's perspective, I think you'll find this book very useful as an intro to both fundamentals and TA, as well as practical examples of how to find these things on the web.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/onlineinvesthks/toc.html

Click on the chapter links to get a lot of the info for free.


However, a word of warning that may save you a lot of time. Throw most of your logic out the door, and learn to see things as they really are. Trading requires you to suspend a lot of your conventional views of logic. Your engineering approach should help you see through this (hopefully).
 
Quote from dtrader98:

From an engineer's perspective, I think you'll find this book very useful as an intro to both fundamentals and TA, as well as practical examples of how to find these things on the web.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/onlineinvesthks/toc.html

Click on the chapter links to get a lot of the info for free.


However, a word of warning that may save you a lot of time. Throw most of your logic out the door, and learn to see things as they really are. Trading requires you to suspend a lot of your conventional views of logic. Your engineering approach should help you see through this (hopefully).
More...

I'm doing quite well with basic technical analysis as a timing tool; however, my most successful trades when reviewed on a journal have to do with fundamentals. This is my most successful year ever, and every single trade was a strong, trended trade with solid fundamentals. The problem is that I couldn't even explain why the fundamentals make sense. I sound dumb when explaining to others why I made the trade. I'd like to make more use of the raw fundamental data.
 
THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR -- Benjamin Graham

Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel’s

Stocks for the Long Run (1994)

or

The Future for Investors.

These might offer a frame work by which you can model. At the very least you'll understand where old money is appreciating and attach weights for strategies and timelines. In a way, you'll know what they're thinking after you've found their burrow.
 
If you want to learn fundamental analysis in order to make money FAST, use William J Oneil to do the fundamental sort for you in conjunction with relative strength. This gives you a universe of stocks that really move. All the Bidus, googs, appl, shiping stocks, etc.......then learn how to trade using TA.

20% per month is typical.
 
Quote from fatrat:

I'm doing quite well with basic technical analysis as a timing tool; however, my most successful trades when reviewed on a journal have to do with fundamentals. This is my most successful year ever, and every single trade was a strong, trended trade with solid fundamentals. The problem is that I couldn't even explain why the fundamentals make sense. I sound dumb when explaining to others why I made the trade. I'd like to make more use of the raw fundamental data.
More...

Congrats on doing a fine job so far. If you want to correlate your companies performance, try plotting graphs of EPS and Rev vs. stock price.
You can find the quarterly numbers at value line (free at most libraries) for last 10 yrs.
They don't always correlate, but a lot of the time they do. The real puzzler is dissecting how they arrive at the actual earnings numbers themselves (huge one time writeoffs, buybacks, etc.). But it's how the market interprets the numbers they get that counts.

One exercise I've done in the past, is to take the top 100yearly performers (can find at MSN investor) and look at how their rev/earnings correlated... results, not much. Plenty of high flyers have zero to horrific earnings, so there has to be more to it than that (high short interest in some cases).
 
Although simplistic at times, Fire Your Stock Analyst by harry Domash has some good materials on analyzing revenues, income, balane sheets, management, growth strategies as well as coverage on valuation (although that is always a guessing game).

Under $20 soft cover at the book store but well worth the investment if you are looking for god coverage of fundamental analysis which is extremely practical.
 
Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

Gain an understanding of Financial Statements from General Accounting, Balance Sheet, Income Statement etc and what makes up both.
Start reading annual reports of various co's.
 
Value Investing - From Graham to Buffett and Beyond
This book will teach you some basics how to read and understand the ratios and financial statements and apply them to low risk value investments.
 
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