I know this post is probably dead, but I just stumbled on it, and thought I’d offer my humble opinion. I studied a variety of fundamental approaches to the market back in the day as part of my CFP preparation…certainly and admittedly not at the depth of a CFA preparatory program. What disturbed me over the past few years was how little trust one can put into a balance sheet, and how outliers can crush a financial model quickly. I began dabbling in TA, and obtained the CMT which was for me simply a way to educate myself on alternative approaches to trading securities. I joined the MTA, and was surprised to find many CFA charterholders who had embraced TA as a valid discipline of risk management. I remember a CFA charterholder telling me, “After I couldn’t figure out why the S&P moved the way it did in my financial model, I began doing trend and momentum analysis.” A simple fact is that some of the most mathmatically brilliant models (perhaps LTCM’s) can fall prey to hubris and the inability to compensate for swings in investor psychology. I am no expert, but TA has opened up a new world of investing to me. I can now look at a wide variety of investments without having to be intimately familiar with each balance sheet and each assumption made in the footnotes. I don’t call this laziness in anyway…it just allows me to sift through more alternative investments with more speed, and cut my losses quickly if I am wrong on an entry point. It also can be a lot of fun, especially when applying fibonacci sequences of time and retracement. I don’t need someone to take me too seriously, but I take my investing much more seriously now than I did before - I am not a day trader. Nothing personal against the fundamental approach. I’m taking an investment management course now which many of my classmates are using as CFA level 2 prep/review, and interestingly enough the professor is planning to spend an entire class on the TA approach. Hopefully he will do it more justice than Reilly and Brown’s Portfolio Management text does. Sorry for my verbocity, but I was a little surprised at the arrogance of some of the earlier posts.