Thanks for all the comments in this thread so far, they've been a great help.
I'm very new to the "fundamental" side of trading and at this point I'm trying to learn what to learn. What I mean by that is that I believe the first thing one has to accomplish when undertaking anything new, is to get a "grasp" of the big picture. A framework to build and expand upon. For instance I've managed and owned several businesses in my day, mostly restaurants. In any business there are a thousand little details; in the food business one must monitor paper and food costs, employment cost, customer service, cleaning and upkeep, promotion, inventory, equipment purchasing and maintenance, insurance, rent, and so on. (And many of these subsets may have their own subsets.) The thousand details of which one must keep track will quickly overwhelm the owner/manager who is not able to grasp an overall perspective of the business he's trying to run, to understand what is more/less important, and what is more/less important at various times, and how every piece fits together w/in the whole. It is simply impossible to run a business effectively until one has achieved that "grasp".
To be clear, I'm not trying to become an authority in UK economics, or, God forbid, a predictor of economic conditions. My main interest lies in watching how the mkts react to economic news, and using that combined w/technical analysis, to get a better understanding of who is participating in the mkts, and when and why, as per Kerr (see my link about Kerr's "philosophy" in my first post for an explanation, if interested.) However, to do this effectively, I think one must have at least an overall general knowledge of economics, as well as an understanding of what may be more or less important at a particular time and why.
So what I've done is to create a preliminary "mindmap" of UK economic indicators, gathered mostly from 3 sites - TradingEducation.com, Daily FX, and the Econ calendar from Forex Factory - in an attempt to see what economic conditions are being monitored. To the far right are the actual econ reports, and to the left (in blue and bold) the particular relevant economic component as I understand it so far.
I can't stress enough that this is a work-in-progress and is very shallow right now, as per my ignorance of the subject. I started off the thread stating that, as I understood it, when it comes to currencies, it was all about interest rates, therefore it's about the state-of-the-economy, inflation-recession-growing-slowing-(stagnation?). So in a sense, perhaps all economic indicators would be subsets of these aspects and the "economic tree" that I'm trying to build should be re-arranged to reflect that. What I've done here is very simplistic, I just tried to relate the particular indicator to its most obvious economic component as I understand it from reading the commentaries on the various sites.
At the very bottom I've included a category of other mkt components that have cropped up in my studies.
The one thing that should be clear from this mindmap is what I'm attempting to do, which is to get the UK economy, as the old joke goes, "organizised". Any comments or suggestions regarding blatant errors, refinements, general thoughts, whatever, would be appreciated.
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b313/Hcour/GBPMindMap2.gif
Thanks,
Harold