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

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Hope everyone is ready for the drop today!!! Who would have thought!

I have been ready since september, all in cash with stock limit buys in place. Roll on. Don`t trade indices any more as I have to be more cautious now but I like watching

markets are remarkably sanguine

jimmy - hope you weren't battered to death, or worse still had your position forcibly closed, for of course the indices are now well off the bottom ...... indeed, going long would not be altogether foolish, even if much of the recovery is already past

I closed my other half last night ,very happy ,in fact it is not knocking the market here as much as i thought it would .

I havn't bothered to post over on the other thread for a few weeks but i'll say here this is a left wing nightmare , i would think Fred's downing the bleach as i write .

i took a modest hit, but as i don't have stops, certainly not much harm done

jimmy - there's a very good index trading thread on advfn that concentrates almost exclusively on Dax - INDEX TRADING WITH THE MT4 SOMNUS EA .... its epic is INDX

Is that the same fellow who was posting on MAM recently ?

Trump not hurting the markets here too much .

yup; that's the guy
he's got what is seemingly a very clever system, though it looks beyond my limited brainpower
nevertheless, it still makes interesting browsing for it's certainly not twaddle even if if do not follow it slavishly - eg allow automatic trades

Cynic - I don't know about your brainpower, because it seems I'm the one closer to suffering with senile dementia.

I've just looked at the thread I started on MAM and because I'm still using the same links, the results are still updating automatically.

hi there bad boy :-)
now get back into the hole where you belong

this morning's rush of blood has evaporated and perhaps the markets are starting to take a reality check

FTSE, DAX and DOW were all significantly up earlier, but FTSE is now -90/100 and DAX is struggling to stay north of 10,600(next support below is ~10,550) ..... DOW is also looking jaded

worth keeping an eye on DOW this evening as ~18,600 should be good support (we're still at ~18,700) .......
if that fails, and remember it is friday tomorrow, then much excitement could be in store

Dow looking ok now 18758 at the moment .

Very bizarre that 'Trumpocalypse' seems to have fizzled out and particularly the proposed new tax rules seem to have appealed to the masses!......especially the rich ones!

well that was a wrong call, and yet again am amazed, but such are the markets

GOLD stocks look to be in for another battering in the morning, but base metal miners (BLT, AAL etc) may well have a different hue

Morning

Missed the fireworks since Monday. No trades.

it's very interesting how the markets have diverged
FTSE is in a strong downtrend
DAX is fairly neutral
DOW continues to forge north or at least to be in a pretty robust upward trend

nevertheless, we all know from experience how ephemeral these trends can be, everything being reversed due to some seemingly innocuous or unimportant occurrence