HAVE A GREAT WEEK END

6 COMMON INVESTMENT STRATEGIES OF FUND MANAGERS (Continued)

Fundamental or technical analysis

Fundamental analysis involves evaluating all the factors that affect an investment's performance. For a stock, it would mean looking at all of the company's financial information, and it may also entail meeting with company executives, employees, suppliers, customers and competitors. "You want to analyze management, really understand what's driving the company and where growth is coming from," Heyman says.

Technical analysis involves choosing assets based on prior trading patterns. You're looking at the trends of an investment's price.

Most managers emphasize fundamental analysis, because they want to understand what will drive growth. Investors expect the stock to rise if a company is growing profits, for example.

But fundamentals don't always carry the day. "You can have a period of time where the market moves on technicals," Holtzman says.

Heyman sees power in technical analysis, because he believes an asset's price at any single moment reflects all the information available about it.

The best managers use both fundamentals and technicals, he says. "If a stock has good fundamentals, it should be stable to rising. If it's not rising, the market is telling you you're wrong or you should be focusing on something else."

                                                                                                                                                              (to be contd)