rather than pick out individual stocks to trade, it can often be worthwhile to trade the indices themselves, especially in times of high volatility.

for those so inclined, i attach below charts for FTSE and FTSE 250, though one might equally be tempted to trade Dow or S&P, which is significantly broader in its coverage, or even NASDAQ

for ease of reading, i have attached 1 year and 3 month charts in each instance

Shortie,

During the entire fourth quarter of 2012 only 38 houses were repossessed by court order in Ireland. At that rate, it would take more than 620 years to get through the backlog of nearly 95,000 mortgage accounts that are at least 90 days behind on payments. It's little wonder that Irish families are prioritising unsecured loans loans costing most to service ahead of their mortgages.

If the troika stops lending and the Irish banks don't/won't/can't repossess, then I'd say there's a train wreck ahead. Similarly, if the banks do start to repossess and are forced into crystallising the inevitable losses onto their balance sheets, then there's also a train wreck ahead. As I said earlier, the banks are in a Catch 22.

"Greece has a role model and the role model is Ireland," Jean-Claude Trichet, former chief of the European Central Bank, famously said back in March 2010

FTSE 4 HR, note the MACD cross, I think we'll see the 6372 support line tested tomorrow.

Decided to let my short run - limit still in from yesterday @6,375 - put in at the time more out of hope than expectation.

Bank of Japan Boosts Bond Purchases at Kuroda’s First Meeting

Bank of Japan (8301) Governor Haruhiko Kuroda began his campaign to end 15 years of deflation with a strengthened stimulus program that will see the central bank buy 7 trillion yen ($746 billion) of bonds a month.

With Kuroda presiding over his first BOJ meeting since taking the helm last month, the board today streamlined its asset purchases by unifying separate programs, temporaily suspending a self-imposed cap on some bond holdings and pledging to buy longer-term debt.



BOJ scraps overnight call rate, sets base money as new target

TOKYO | Thu Apr 4, 2013 6:09am BST

(Reuters) - The Bank of Japan decided on a radical overhaul of its policy framework on Thursday, shifting its target when setting monetary policy to base money from the current overnight call rate.

The central bank said it will double its holdings of long-term government bonds and exchange-traded funds while buying government bonds with all maturities, including 40-year bonds.

"The BOJ will conduct money-market operations so that the monetary base will increase at an annual pace of about 60 to 70 trillion yen (£498.9 billion) )," the BOJ said in a statement.

Quite a range (unsurprisingly).

6% rise in two days for the index. That's great.

Mmm - got my calls badly wrong last night - stopped out on both - hey ho

Nikkei was below 11900 on 2nd April, now 12630 (+6% in two days).

EUR Italian Services PMI 45.5 43.4 43.6

EUR Final Services PMI 46.4 46.5 46.5

GBP Services PMI 52.4 51.4 51.8

EUR Spanish 10-y Bond Auction 4.48|2.1 previous 4.90|1.9

EUR PPI m/m 0.2% 0.2% 0.4%

EUR French 10-y Bond Auction 1.94|3.1 previous 2.10|2.2

Sterling Steady After BOE MPC Leaves Rates, QE Unchanged

I've been limited out @6,375 +98.7.

Looks like that may be too early.

i am told that the downside target for ftse is 6125 though you may want to trade it in the meantime

for myself, i'm not sure what to do with this now very juice ftse short - e.g. AFR has taken a clattering this morning for now known reason ... i have a number of options, all of which have their merits

i can't work out whether the fall is primarily due to some last minute profit-taking for y/e or something more radical ..... in the meantime, dow is very whore's drawers but should be on a decent downward trend

followed the discipline - banked a very juice profit on ftse, in part because i'll be travelling tomorrow

cynic oil price falling warm weather coming!

AFR fall too big for that annual anomaly, but assuredly some big profits been made over the last 12 months

There must be a N Korean element in the markets to a certain degree, I'd have thought.

skin don't worry the"fat boy" will back down, otherwise he is in for a spanking!

He and his beautiful wife were riding in amusement park in N Korea earlier this year.

50 day well and truly broken.