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

Am I correct in saying that it will soon be possible to short the banks again?
BARC, HBOS, HSBC, LLOY, & RBS are all constituents of the FTSE 100, which means if the hedge funds all gang up together again, the index is in for a difficult time.

Yes you are right. RNS after market shut yesterday. They probably won't be in trouble because most hedge funds don't appear to be in the market anymore.

OIL
Sorry to have to admit that i foolishly gave back a big slice of the profits i had accumulated trading nymex, but sure am glad i cut when i did ..... nymex currently dropping like a stone ahead of US crude stock report later

Came out at 3pm ish I think. Much bigger stockpiles than thought.

Likely to drop with Ukraine/Gaza resolution too.

DD .... you're right

cynic are we looking at oil falling to $25-30 over the next 3 months?

personally i do not think so, but then i would not have expected MKS to be up on the day either!

As I said over Christmas.... low volumes have a habit of exaggerating price moves in many markets, and this week may be a better guide to the true market direction. The MKS chart suggested a rise was possible, but my guess is it'll be heading back down again soon.

In my opinion.

Strawbs.

Latest shorting figures.......

http://www.investegate.co.uk/invarticle.aspx?id=66471

Huge amount of data out next week (w/c 12th jan) from the U.S. including retail sales & crude inventories. Will be interesting to see if that gets us close to the bottom of the bear cycle. I can't imagine any of the figures will be good, just depends on whether they are worse than anticipated.

Don't think it is my imagination, but liquidity in the market definately appears to have improved over the last few days. Share price spreads are slowly returning to normal. Also, the recent profit warnings have not resulted in huge drops which tends to suggest all the bad news is already in the market. Therefore, this could be a bottoming process unless the economy takes another major turn for the worse.

The market seems to have settled down recently, dare I say a little dull even. As well as prices not seeing huge drops on bad news, last week we had a number of positive trading update, even on the high street, so maybe not as gloomy as we had anticipated.

deb,dnlm,grg,dom,sbry and jd. all had positive updates last week.

MKS and MPI certainly didn't!

In fact MPI has come out with two poor trading updates and the sp has remained stable.

With so much data coming out of the U.S. today, including US Core Retail Sales m/m, US Retail Sales m/m, US Import Prices m/m, US Business Inventories m/m, US Crude Oil Inventories, US Beige Book, I am surprised DOW futures are only currently showing -29. Presumably that shows that they don't really know what's coming & will react once the figures are known?

Not sure I like the look of todays drop.
Hopefully I will be proved wrong but on a day when the market may well have rose, this drop certainly has the look of a SM that knows the economy has just taken another step for the worse.

Went into Leicester last night and was shocked at the total lack of people. It was like a ghost city. It was so quiet that I thought something must have occurred during the day.

8370 is major support for Dow supposedly

DOW futures now -60.

Not sure why 8370 is critical? I would have expect support to be higher than that now.

depends on how the charts are formulated - i.e. the "system" preferred

Think 8370 is the lowest point in the last few weeks on the candestick chart. My guess is that markets will continue lower. I suspect they'll want to give G.W. a fitting send off. They'll probably give the new president a welcome bounce, but with continued economic misery I doubt it'll be long before we retest last years lows again.

In my opinion.....

Strawbs.