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

Only dealing I do outside of SIPP & ISA these days is S/B.

What is this TAX of which you speak? :-)

Interesting notes Skinny - I'm around 27% ytd part time on my ISA, just looking for capital growth stocks in my ISA, if they've got a good yield even better, SIPP much slower!

Edit - agreed about the tax! Aim is to get a tax free income from yield on the huge capital I will no doubt have generated when I retire :-)

If only Osborne would allow all AIM shares to be included in an ISA .

Capital gains tax, skinny! Very occasionally I get caught. How is the spread betting going??? Isn't the theory that 'if it regularly made money for gamblers, HMRC would tax it?' ;o)

h, don't think that's likely as the stock ISA isn't really for high risk stocks. Don't really want to lose it all before I get to retirement age!

skin thought ISA's were intended to help companies to attract investment from "joe public".

Pretty good going SC - I agree about the ISA yield - its more 'secondary' to the capital growth for people of a certain age.

halifax - I don't know about 'joe public', but I only invest for me!

Harry the S/B is ok this year so far - I have had 'disagreements' with several companies over the years (like most people) and don't really want to say much more than that! :-)

Share dealing within an ISA makes good sense in general surely, only down side that I can see is that you can't claim any capital losses, answer?.. don't buy any losers -):

I have a large slice of LLOY in my ISA, so God willing and a fair wind, I should be well in the (tax free) money by.........hmmmm........hopefully in my lifetime anyway!

We can but hope Harry - I have a few in the ISA and a shed load in the SIPP.

I have a fair few RBS in the ISA - so will be watching on Friday.

Anyone know "exactly" how much we (the public) payed for Lloyds? around 70p I heard this morning.

Stan pretty sure it was 72p. Harry hope you're about 60 otherwise my lifetime will be up before I,m in the 'tax free money' with LLoyds

Average price is 63.1p apparently!

Taxpayer-backed Lloyds share price jumps as it records £1.5bn profits

"After last week’s collapse of the sale of 632 branches to the Co-op, Lloyds said its planned flotation of the newly renamed TSB should take place “sometime in the middle of next year”. The Government still owns 39 per cent of Lloyds following its £20 billion bailout in 2009. Even with today’s 2p rise in the share price to 55.5p this is still well short of the Treasury’s average buying price of 63.1p."

Bow to your superior knowledge Skinny!

Google - not me! :-)

Lloyds launched a rights issue to raise capital from existing shareholders – as an existing 43.4% shareholder, the government chose to take part in this and thus maintained its shareholding at 43.4%.[36][37] Following this, the National Audit Office has calculated the government's average buying price for its entire stake in Lloyds as about 74p.[38]
Taken from Wikipedia don't know how reliable that is!

Ok so it's anybody's guess ie anywhere between 63 and 74p

Your return is very impressive Skinny. My wife uses a personal broker who returned 17.5%, which she's happy with.

GBP Nationwide HPI m/m -0.1% 0.3% 0.0%

GBP Manufacturing PMI 49.8 48.6 48.3