What is Investment Analysis?
Investment Analysis is a process that evaluates an asset’s risk-reward trade off by quantifying its expected returns, volatility, and correlation with an external variable. To do this, analysts must first understand the various drivers of a security’s value in order to forecast its future price behavior. Once they have predicted how these drivers will affect the security’s price in the future, they can then calculate its expected return for each driver scenario and estimate its possible terminal value. This process is used to compare the expected returns of a security with its actual returns, in order to estimate if it has been under- or over-valued by the markets and how it could become re-priced.
In addition to providing investors with an estimate of the value at which a security may be traded, investment analysis is also useful in forecasting the impact of macroeconomic events on investments. Despite its numerous benefits, it should be noted that investment analysis is not infallible. For instance, projections must take into account all available information regarding a firm’s future growth prospects as well as relevant macroeconomic events (e.g., interest rate changes). However, market inefficiencies may cause the projections to be overly optimistic or pessimistic.
Main Components of Investment Analysis
Portfolio Management: Portfolio management is the process of managing and controlling your portfolio when investing in a variety of assets or investments. It involves calculating the current value of your portfolio based on how you invested and how it is performing at the moment. It also involves choosing which investments to buy, sell, and hold for your portfolio. The most important tool in portfolio management is the risk-reward ratio. This is simply a way to measure whether an investment has a favorable rate of return for its level of risk or not. Another important tool is modeling. This is the process of using formulas and formulas with mathematics to estimate or predict a future outcome. In portfolio management, it is used to determine how much money you can lose or make on an investment in a given time period.
Quotes and Charts
Quotes are used to get the current price of certain assets, similar to how we might use stock prices as a reference point for measuring the overall health of the market. Quotes for stocks, bonds, etc., give investors estimates of what exactly shares are currently worth at any given moment in time. The price is determined by supply and demand and how many buyers there are at that particular moment versus how many sellers there are. To get prices, investors use market data. This is a collection of real-time quotes and historic information that charts the price behavior of a certain asset over time. Generally, in order to understand the price behavior of an asset, investors look at simple charts with two vertical lines showing points in time. One axis on the graph measures price and the other axis measures quantity. This is typically referred to as a line chart or line plot.
Market Value: Market value refers to the total dollar amount that all investors are willing to pay for a stock based on its future earnings and dividends (discounted by how much they are expected to grow) alongside market sentiment at that particular moment in time.
Market Capitalization: Market capitalization is the total value of a company based on its market value multiplied by the number of shares outstanding.
What is Risk-Rejection?: Risk-rejection refers to the price behavior of an asset rejecting the price that analysts had predicted, in order to prevent losses from occurring. Sometimes these rejections are short-lived and sometimes they can be prolonged periods where prices continue to trend away from a projected path. Risk-rejection is most common with assets that already show heavy signs of being overvalued or undervalued.
Correlation: A correlation is the relationship between two variables. These variables can be related in any way, including the direction of their relationship with itself. For example, if investment analysis says that stocks are “correlated” to oil prices and if oil prices increase, then you can expect that stock prices will fall as well. In addition to financial instruments, correlations can apply to political factors such as when there is an increase in the value of a US dollar versus other currencies or gold.
Generally speaking, simply looking at correlations between two assets doesn’t tell investors what will happen to one asset due to an increase or decrease in another asset’s value. In order to quantify the impact that one asset has on another, it is necessary to specify a formula. Most of the time, these formulas rely on the efficient market hypothesis and statistical methods, which are math-based. The efficient market hypothesis states that it is impossible for markets to be manipulated in a way that would affect price behavior other than through supply and demand.
