Photo © Elliot Hewitt
In online trading, technical analysis occupies a major place. Charts, patterns, trends, support and resistance levels make up the common language of a large share of content devoted to financial markets. Another approach, less visual and often more demanding to grasp, starts from the real economy in an attempt to understand asset moves: fundamental analysis, and more specifically its macroeconomic component.
It is this second reading of markets that Elliot Hewitt advocates. His position is not to systematically reject the use of charts, but to argue that a purely technical reading often remains incomplete. Where the chart mainly shows what price is doing, macroeconomic analysis seeks to understand the forces likely to drive that movement.
The difference between the two approaches lies first and foremost in their starting point. Technical analysis primarily observes the past and present behaviour of prices. The trader works from charts, draws lines, identifies geometric shapes or recurring configurations, and then forms hypotheses about the market’s possible direction.
Fundamental analysis takes a different route. It seeks to understand events capable of altering economic and financial balances: central bank decisions, inflation, employment, growth, interest rates, fiscal policy, geopolitical tensions, or even changes in currencies and commodities. The issue is no longer simply to note that a price is rising or falling, but to understand why investors are revising their expectations.
This distinction may sound theoretical, yet it profoundly changes the way a market is approached. A central bank decision, for example, is not just information to be entered into an economic calendar. It can reshape rate expectations, bond yields, capital flows and, by extension, the value of currencies or risk assets.
In the approach defended by Elliot Hewitt, the task is, in particular, to identify the market’s dominant theme, understand what investors are already pricing in, and then look for data or events likely to trigger a surprise. The next step is to determine whether that surprise is merely a temporary move or whether it genuinely challenges the prevailing economic scenario.
The macroeconomic approach therefore requires linking several phenomena together. A change in inflation can alter monetary policy expectations, which may in turn influence bond yields, currencies or risk assets. Different asset classes do not operate in isolation.
It requires more knowledge and may be less immediately accessible than a chart accompanied by a few indicators. It is precisely this complexity that partly explains why it remains less visible in content aimed at the general public.
For Elliot Hewitt, however, that difficulty is not a reason to set it aside. On the contrary, it is the foundation on which market understanding should rest. His approach belongs to an old tradition in finance: that of investors and fund managers who seek to interpret economic decisions, expectations and capital flows before taking a position.
Today, he aims to make this way of working more accessible to a French-speaking audience. Through his content and his activity on social media, Elliot Hewitt has helped popularise a market reading in which economic releases, monetary policy and broader macroeconomic trends play a central role.
This drive to democratise comes at a time when trading is often presented in a highly visual form. Charts naturally lend themselves to the short formats favoured by social media: a pattern, a price zone or a trend line can be explained in a few seconds. By contrast, understanding the consequences of monetary policy or a shift in inflation expectations takes more time and more context.
According to Elliot Hewitt, this is also one of the reasons technical analysis occupies such a prominent place in retail trading. It is easy to illustrate, simple to explain and immediately understandable. Macroeconomics, by contrast, forces each piece of information to be placed within a broader framework.
And yet it is omnipresent in how markets function. Professional traders track economic indicators and major central bank decisions on a daily basis, because these can change investor expectations and trigger significant moves across several asset classes.
From this perspective, fundamental analysis does not necessarily aim to predict every price move. Rather, it provides a framework for identifying which events are likely to alter the balance between buyers and sellers, and in which direction economic expectations may shift.
Elliot Hewitt often uses the image of a river current to explain this logic. Macroeconomics helps identify the general direction of the flow, while short-term price moves represent the turbulence and obstacles encountered along the way. The chart can then remain useful for timing or execution, without necessarily being the main source of the trading idea.
This distinction also helps qualify the debate between technical and fundamental analysis. The two do not answer exactly the same question: while the former mainly seeks to interpret price behaviour, the latter attempts to identify the economic forces that may help determine it. In practice, the two can also be combined.
This philosophy is also one of the pillars of the Macro Trader Accelerator, the programme developed by Elliot Hewitt around macro and fundamental trading. Its aim is to teach a method that connects economic data, monetary policy, different asset classes and market expectations in order to build a coherent reading before looking for execution.
Elliot Hewitt’s positioning is therefore less about creating a new school of thought than about making a historically established method more accessible in professional asset management. In a digital universe where trading is often reduced to a few chart patterns, indicators or supposedly universal methods, his work consists in reintroducing an economic and financial dimension into the conversation.
An approach that serves as a reminder of a fundamental market reality: behind every chart are companies, central banks, governments, consumers, capital flows and economic decisions. Understanding these mechanisms obviously does not guarantee market forecasting, but it can allow investors to look at markets through a wider lens than the chart alone.
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