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

Cable 1.52! I think this might be the big one!

Sharp movement of share prices is all due to compuetrised trading system.

Sell is triggerred by the programmes when index starts to fall and buy is triggerred when it rises, but in smaller sizes.

wowee! Dow being predicted as opening DOWN 600

I can't believe you haven't already traded a piece of that prediction, Cynic.
Indications have been down all morning.

do keep up , the futures have been suspended for hours!

we have restrictions in place today. futures limited to -5% which is why they haven't moved and the same at start of trade. If it happens, then there is a 2 min breathing space b4 trading begins again. If down 10% then another 2 mins and so on till a big fat Zero I suppose.

looking at IG CFDs which look possible to trade ..... currently showing -640 actually

harry ..... have got out of almost all ..... far far too scary for me

Richard, US suspended until 2.30pm. IG are making their own opinion as to where the DJ will start trading.

Could quite easily hit 7900 when trading commences.

If this carries on....panicstricken sellers will drop the markets further....gloom and doom....may this end soon !.

yes, i know it's IGs "view" but presumably backed by biz too .... in fact now indicating/predicting -700 ...... if that is borne out, it is hard to believe that FTSE does not have a bundle more to lose

now -780 ...... IG are going to be either awfully right or awfully wrong, but i suspect the former will be closer

Fortunes being made shorting and lost !.

glad i was just an interested observer!

US h'sing stats coming out at 3pm

place your bets now please ..... you know full well that whichever way you choose will be wrong!

and here's the answer ......

Existing home sales stronger than expected in September, up 5.5% to 5.18 million annual rate.

Gap close and down so far...

Used the slight recovery to get out of BG. for evens. US has a long way to go today and fully expect trading to be stopped at the 5% and maybe 10% or 20% before their day is out.

I stopped day trading ftse early October(fortunately away for two weeks with no computer access), it was far to volatile for me anyway, like being at the races. But I will hopefully start again in November if calm returns.

I kept a paper record of my trading system for the rest of October, and the results were huge gains, but it could just have easily have been huge losses.

Happy to sit this one out for now.