Chapter 9. Fundamental Analysis

Now that the global financial crisis seems to come to an end, most of the investors are moving back to equity markets. By doing so, you face the problem of choosing the stocks that will outperform the other shares during the upcoming time period. To find the right investment asset to purchase, you have two basic options. On one hand, you may rely on any trends and patterns in the development of the historical prices. When developing an investment recommendation based on trends and patterns, you do a technical analysis. On the other hand, you may try to figure out which firms will exceed the market by analyzing their financial performance, strategic position, or future plans. This is called fundamental analysis.

This chapter provides you an aid on how to use R to identify successful fundamental trading strategies for equity investments. We will start by applying basic statistical methods and move on to advanced and more complex ones while we cover how to translate...