Fundamental and timing analysis
Why a price moved before it showed up on the chart: what is on the calendar, what is not, and what the crowd already believed when the number landed.
Twelve lessons, in the order they make sense to read. Free, no account, and nothing here requires owning anything of ours.
What this covers, and what it assumes
Technical analysis describes what has happened. It is very good at that and it cannot tell you why. Two charts with identical structure behave differently when one currency pays four per cent more than the other, and nothing on the chart says so.
This branch is the other half: the interest rate, the release that moved it, the curve that predicted the release, and the positioning that decided how far the move went. It assumes no economics — every term is defined where it first appears.
It does not depend on the volume and order flow branch, and that branch does not depend on this one. They meet at the chart.
The twelve lessons
Lesson 1
Why price moves: events, non-events and sentiment
Three things move a price and only one of them is on the calendar. The frame the rest of this branch is built on, and why "the market is random" is an alibi.
Lesson 2
The global markets, and the instruments that track them
Seven markets, their sub-types, and the contract-for-difference that lets one account reach all of them — including what a CFD is not.
Lesson 3
Reserve currencies, resource currencies and market bias
Why the yen and the franc rise when the news is bad and the Australian dollar falls, and how that split decides which way you are leaning before you trade.
Lesson 4
The economic calendar and streaming news
What the previous, forecast and actual columns actually mean, why the surprise moves the price rather than the number, and one release day read across three markets.
Lesson 5
GDP, and what it does to a currency
Why gross, why domestic, when it is published, and what the same release did to EURUSD and to the Dow on the same afternoon.
Lesson 6
The US Dollar Index: four indices, four answers
DXY, the Bloomberg index, the Dow Jones FXCM index and the trade-weighted index disagree because their weights disagree. Which one to watch, and against what.
Lesson 7
Money, interest rates and the central bank
Money supply from M0 up, the interest rate as the price of money, and how a statement and a dot plot are read for what they imply rather than what they say.
Lesson 8
The yield curve, and how bonds lead currencies
Bond prices and yields move opposite ways, the curve between two maturities says what the market expects, and the ten-year has led the dollar at every meeting.
Lesson 9
Monetary policy and the rate decision as a tradeable event
Open market operations, reserve requirements and the discount rate — and what happened to three currency pairs on the days their central banks moved.
Lesson 10
The releases that move the tape: PMI, employment, retail sales and CPI
The four families of number that actually shift a price, what each measures, why the core version matters more, and what a miss looked like in each.
Lesson 11
Market sentiment and the speculative sentiment index
Why a good number can be sold, what the ratio of open long to open short positions is telling you, and why it is read against the crowd.
Lesson 12
Building a fundamental trading strategy, step by step
Eight decisions in order — instrument, market, timeframe, bias, size, hedge, hedge timing, second instrument — and the dashboard that holds them.
The other half
Reading volume and order flow tells you what is happening on the chart right now. This branch tells you what put it there. Most people find they want both, and the order does not matter much.
Something here not making sense?
Tell us which part and we will explain it. If it is a common question it gets written into the lesson, so the next person does not have to ask.