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

Goldman scandal is what has spooked the DOW period ....

true, but to be honest, dow has been looking for an excuse to drop for a little while ..... somehow it has defied gravity and a couple of sets of bad employment numbers

a fall of 3/400 points is far from impossible without remotely challenging the upward trend

on re-reading my archives ....

11000 is an obvious "round number" support, but in truth10780 is arguably the next meaningful point - that was the initial upward target

if that is reached and breached, then there's a further 200 point downside

Not much mention of the election here.....anybody see the whole debate last night ?...caught just ten minutes of sweep brown, bugs bunny cameron and the other bloke !...by the way, who the hell is he ?, ......love the way now that the tv news has become all impartial all of a sudden after promoting labour for the last 12 years...talk about turncoats !....

You may now get your DOW downturn cynic ...

As for the election i shall be back in the UK for that and can at least help vote Labour out . Would also be nice to be out of the EU but that's never going to happen ...

RF .... yes both my wife and i did ..... we concur that the newspapers must have been watching a different prog if they thought clegg was fantastic .... we thought him dreadful and like an overgrown schoolboy ..... standing with his hands in his pockets was also less than impressive

i thought cameron looked a bit frayed towards the end, but (to me) he at least sounded and presented like a serious contender to lead the country

while there is certainly a lot of anger against ALL politicians, i strongly suspect that when it comes to "X on paper time", lib dems will do ok, but will not approach anything like the level indicated by today's polls

A change of government is well overdue, time to give the country a fresh start (if you can call it that) and bring in some laws preventing overborrowing...

" bring in some laws preventing overborrowing"
and how would you propose that???

one could say similarly about lib dems idea of immigrants only being able to work in a specified area of the country.
i suppose they could be indentured like slaves!
restrictive societies like UAE and Saudi assuredly make it very difficult for foreigners to move jobs, but those are very small communities, and UK courts would (quite rightly) refuse to sanction similar practice

i get a nasty feeling that monday is going to bring more heavy falls, including more in usa when it opens for biz ..... this goldman thing has the feel of "can of worms"

I don't have a one line answer to preventing getting oneself in to indebtness...but the next government are going to have to put paid to buy a sofa now and pay next year...that sort of thing and also put paid to labour's only answer to anything : "tax and borrow".

I hope it's not going to be too much of a drop but another 40 points down looks on the cards....

my gut feeling is that 11000 won't hold

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there has always always been hire-purchase and there's always ways around deposits or similar .... and for sure you can't stop companies offering what look on the surface to be very attractive deals, even if the interest is already built into the price

seems strange to us based on the news so far that Goldman Sachs have not been charged with (criminal) theft by deception.

well try this then .... longer version on cnnfn.com

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday charged Wall Street's most gilded firm, Goldman Sachs, with defrauding investors in a sale of securities tied to subprime mortgages.

The SEC said it charged New York-based Goldman (GS, Fortune 500) and a vice president, Fabrice Tourre, for their failure to disclose conflicts in a 2007 sale of a so-called collateralized debt obligation

cynic yes that is the present situation but it is apparently a civil action not a criminal action.

spot the difference! ..... it will assuredly unsettle the markets (quite badly), not least because dow in particular is currently o'bought and looking for a good reason to correct sharply

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the serious implications of the airport closures across europe may also start to register on the investing public ..... it has much greater economic significance that might first be realised

Ironic that the PIIGS have been spared the ash and are airborne

I wonder if folk will start shorting the airlines ? , i thought it would be back to normal in a day or so but this looks as though it's ongoing.

Buy ferry operators, short european airlines !.....and bus operators...perhaps trains as well...I imagine Eurostar must be running at full capacity...

Can't help thinking no pun intended every cloud has a silver lining as outlined above traders will just move from sector to sector going long and short. Until interest rates increase stocks in the right sectors are still attractive for now.