Stock Market Analysis in Practice: Is It Technical or Fundamental?

Investors use varies tools in the investment process. Some use technical or fundamental analysis, or both in that process. The aim of the following survey research is first, to examine differences between professional portfolio managers to amateur investors in their approach towards technical and fundamental analysis. Second, we want to study the difference of use of fundamental and technical tools in the buying versus selling stocks. We used online survey in one of the leading business portals in addition to asking professional investors in a leading investment house in Israel. Our results show no significant difference between professional and non-professional investors in terms of how frequently they use fundamental and technical investment tools. Both groups of investors use more frequently fundamental tools than technical when they make buy/sell decisions. We also found that non-professional investors use more fundamental tools such as "analysts' recommendations" when they buy stocks and more technical tools such as "support and resistance lines" when they sell stocks. Moreover, our study indicates that investors use financial statements and support and resistance lines together as a primary tool for their investment behavior. This result breaks a common hypothesis arguing that fundamental and technical tools do not mix.