How to do your own FOMC meeting analysis
Posted by Doug Rice on Wed, Sep 23, 2009 @ 02:04 PM
Today's FOMC meeting offers opportunity to not just talk about financial markets but also critical thinking and learning new skills. If you took the last statement and used Word to compare it to this statement, you would see exactly what has changed. Viewing the information in this way not only eliminates the middle man and their filter or bias, but also provides a faster more productive way to see what has changed.
Many financial analysts use this comparison method to see what changes quarter over quarter in company statements. You can use it in your work as well. Any document that gets updated regularly can be copy/pasted to see what the differences are. It's faster and more accurate than trying to remember or figure out what changed.
To do this open Word, go to Review tab, then Compare. Select the two docs and viola! Really helpful in some situations.
Here's the result of today's meeting vs. the meeting from August 12, 2009.
As you can see, the meeting did make a small change in the language, but in general things are about the same. Now compare your impression to this view of the data to what you hear in the media about this event. That evaluation will help you understand how the source interprets things vs. how you see it.