Episode Summary

This season-opening episode kicks off our company analysis series by putting the market's two dominant, competing investment philosophies head-to-head: fundamental analysis, which values a business's cash flows and competitive position to find its intrinsic value, and technical analysis, which completely ignores the underlying business to trade price and volume patterns on a chart. We also introduce a third perspective—the efficient market hypothesis—which argues that intense professional competition ensures current market prices are already correct, making both methods a waste of time for beating the market.

We look honestly at what decades of academic research shows about both approaches, exposing why most active managers underperform their benchmar ...