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

Friday is quadruple witching day!

Double Witchings, Triple Witchings and Werewolves

that'll be exciting and unpredictable then :-)

These days its only worth putting in wide limits on the indexes.

i don't put any

I do :-)

NMX 3720
succumbed to "itchy finger" and bought back that contract at 10307 with the intent of trading it - profitably i hope - during the course of the day

DOW - I'm now running short.

Picked up a few UU. for the ISA this morning

i could easily be wrong, but ftse at 6554 looks like a modest support level ..... provided the dow (in the persona of MrB) doesn't scare us all, then i would favour the likelihood of a rise tomorrow - more likely starting this evening on the back of the dow

a good firm equivocal prediction don't you think? :-)

I agree. I think. Possibly. :-)

did i make a good call or what :-)) ?
dow currently +170 and ftse +80

I knew it would. :-)

Short @6,633

as for me, have just closed all dow/ftse except one small long position in both

1-0 to the machines.

It was all over in 1/1000th of a second!

I can't think what you are suggesting!

Actually, skinners, I'm not a big fan of the 'Us and Them' conspiracy theory, and I very much doubt that any more than a handful of people were privy to a sneak preview of the release.

It only takes the first player who has seen the news to react and take the offer and put a bid in its place causing the price to break from its range, and that will trigger 100's (if not 1,000's) of algos into following the price action. Those algos won't have necessarily seen (or interpreted) the data as they will just be programmed to act like sheep and chase the price. It's almost certain that they will also be programmed to close out immediately the army of retail punters try to get on board and provide some liquidity for the algos to sell into. As per the Nanex data, this was done and dusted in a flash.

So, no great conspiracy theory from me, just an observation that the HFT algos won, and the retail punter who takes 650ms to press his mouse button (and 11 minutes to find the mouse beforehand) will have lost. I don't even think there was anything complex about the algorithms used - it is simply a case of the firms involved having super-duper hi-tech connections into the liquidity pool to ensure they're the first to reach the offer.

Have you read this interview with a HF Trader?

now i'm in a quandary as to what to do next, even if it's nothing

my gut instinct is that both dow and ftse will continue north, but obviously not in a straight line - so shall prob wait for a "bad day" to add to my existing small longs

WPP, which i already hold, looks one to benefit further though i shan't add

international transportation index is worth looking at - don't know its NMX code - on the basis that world economies are now recovering and will be cheered further by the weaker $

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and have obeyed myself by taking the profit on my trading contract from 2 days ago in NMX3720