Economics vs Technical Analysis?

Or Fundamental analysis vs technical analysis if you like. I have been thinking what is the better way of spending my time on learning forex. Should i invest time in learning Economics or should i invest time learning technical analysis.
I personally think that in the long term people are reacting to fundamentals rather then technical indicators but shorter term technical levels play important role. So should i study both and make some kind of synergy? Or focus on one and become "expert" on one thing?

I think you will have better results when you study both of them. In technical analysis there are so many traps, cause for whatever reason people turn off their common sense when just using technical analysis. And honestly, most of this technical stuff doesn't work. Looks good in hindsight, but doesn't work in real-time.

Fundamental analysis on the other hand will force you to sharpen your common sense. So a combination of both should give you a good result.

For currencies? Both for sure. Technicals define your day, but when the market strongly trends its because of fundamentals. At the very least you don't want to be against these.

Not exactly sure, but i suspect that people who hold positions overnight or longer may rely more heavily on data expectations when deciding to trade or not.

Depending on how normal/strange you are.. economics could also be considered quite interesting also I personally quite enjoy following the data and the reasons behind it, but trying to as much as possible predict a price move based on technical analysis is tricky enough.. trying to predict data values without doing economic analysis full time would be crazy

Hello and thank you for your answers. I was also for me learning about economics an fundamental analysis for above mentioned reasons. Plus economics is far more interesting to me then drawing lines all they along on charts. I am not saying that they are not important but just less relevant in long run. I also love to to fundamental thing that is moving the data. Unfortunately this is sometimes not so obvious in economics.

I've been trading FX for Banks for 16 years since graduating college with an economics degree, and I can tell you, I had to throw everything I learnt in college out the window from my first day on the job.

The markets will go where it wants to go.

Economics is great if you're trading in long-term timeframes and have deep pockets to withstand contradicting hedgefund flows and/or central bank action.

But if you like trading timeframes less than, say, 4hour bars, I'd advise not coloring your judgement with a possibly faulty bias with regards to future price moves. Do not try to predict future intraday moves based on economic numbers. React to the moves instead, and ignore the bias of "the economic number is THIS, therefore price should do THAT".

React to the MOVES... not the NEWS...

My two cents.