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

made another small turn, but far too quickly - he said with 20/20 hindsight!
still, i have a couple of other dow longs running, though they're currently out of the money, but a lot less so than they were 20 minutes ago :-)

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would very much like to see ftse close back above 6200 but it still has about 25 points to go

after a bit of a gloomy friday i am very pleasantly surprised to see FTSE having another dart at 6200
whether it can breach and hold is another matter

FTSE looking interesting currently 6084

bought a bit prematurely at 6100, but i hope won't prove to have been too rash

.

Heading towards 6000 again .

or even a tad lower
however, my gut feeling - not necessarily correct - is that thursday will see no change in interest rates in usa, and thus are big surge, sustained or not
and if there is a very small rise, is that not effectively already discounted?

Last time it went under 6000 we had a 350 point bounce .

On it's way back got down as low as 6017 all depends on the DOW as well this afternoon i suppose .

FTSE has really struggled today but has at last limped back north of 6100
it would be nice to have a good blue day on both sides of the pond

too ambitious for today i'm sure, but ideally DOW needs to climb above 16,500 and, in due course, FTSE above 6,200

16,500 has proved pretty stubborn of late but with this early surge, there's just a chance that it will follow through and bust out

woohoo!
never expected a GOOD day like today ...... glad i already had a couple of longs already in place, even though they've been a bit scary of late

cashed in half Dow for +100 but have left all FTSE running as i'm pretty confident that that will whizz at least first thing tomorrow

I couldn't be by my screen after 1 pm so couldn't play , annoying as i was going long FTSE ,should have gone long earlier at 6050. Got a couple of stocks running long though which is more my thing .

i have "hold" stocks, but have been trading Dow and FTSE to a lesser extent almost exclusively ...... i've been quite disciplined and not thrown big money at it, but it can still be quite scary

not unexpectedly, FTSE 6,200 has proved to be a hurdle, though it was breached for a couple of minutes about 15 minutes ago
managed to sell 1/2 FTSE long just below that as level was dropping for +96 ..... a nice start to the day :-)

Doesn't want to go through that 6200 does it and now falling away.

i still have a long position at 6200 placed when the market was heading south
always assuming fed indeed stays steady on interest rates as expected, it is not impossible that there'll be a renewed burst of energy

DOW
stalled as expected at 16,700 so cleared balance of long just below that
yummy yummy - will def pay for dinner!

quite tempted to short as "no change" probably now accounted for, but not brave enough


FTSE
closed comfortably through 6200 and have left long running there from exactly that level - well 6200.2 if you want to be pedantic

FTSE
changed my mind and banked nice profit at 6238

DOW
very small short running from 16,687 ...... slightly wrong call at the moment