Currency Futures - Lazy Man's Fundamental Analysis?

There are dozens of fundamental indicators. Following the news and keeping up with them for one or more countries could be very time consuming.

I was thinking, wouldn’t future prices for a currency be a general summary indicator correlating to expert analysts’ expectations of a given currency based on primarily fundamental indicators?

I don’t think you quite understand how futures are traded based on that comment, but the quick answer is that futures fluctuate just as much as the spot price, meaning there isn’t some magical “future” price for a currency future. The difference is that the future interest payments are already built in to the trading price of a currency future.

But I won’t let you leave empty-handed!

Many traders find some use in observing the COT (commitments of traders) report that comes out weekly, and it is based on open positions in the [I]currency futures[/I] market. And if you look and track the Non-commercial positions (which is basically the speculative portion of the market), you can actually derive some form of “lazy man’s” fundamental analysis because you are observing what position professional speculators are taking.

Problem is that this report is only produced every week, and its only from tuesday’s end of day positions. So at best, you could produce some form of weekly indicator, but that’s certainly good enough if you are merely looking for overall market sentiment!