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

friday - fingers and toes x'ed that Dow can finish the week on a positive note .... currently +48 which is off its earlier highs

dow now looking very sick at -128 primarily on the escalation of libyan violence and unrest ...... does not augur well for london tomorrow

the french are so damn predictable ..... a long time ago i know, but when libya was previously outlawed by all other western nations, who supported ghadafi and walked in for huge oil contracts? .... now read the latest reports and get a sense of deja vu

Market summary note from Morgan Stanley:
Risk-reward for equities beginning to deteriorate
We believe the risk-reward for equities is beginning to deteriorate given a combination of peaking economic lead indicators, interest rate hikes, a rising oil price and elevated readings on our market timing indicators.
Time to invest in defensive stocks again
Given these headwinds we recommend investors become a bit more prudent and look to increase their weighting in defensive sectors. We cite four reasons:
1) History suggests that defensives outperform post peaks in lead indicators and at the start of a new interest rate cycle.
2) Defensive sectors are very unpopular European investors are now more underweight defensives than financials.
3) Over the last 40 years the only prior occasion when defensives had underperformed as much on a two-year rolling basis was in the 2000 TMT bubble.
4) Post poor performance, defensive valuations look increasingly attractive.
Telecoms to maximum overweight.
We are raising defensives from a big underweight to neutral by increasing our overweight in Telecoms and reducing our underweight in Utilities. Telecoms is our preferred defensive sector as we think it offers greater potential for a positive growth surprise as well as offering a substantial dividend yield boost over other sectors.
Going underweight Industrials
To fund our more positive view on defensives, we are going underweight Industrials as we believe the sector is one of the most vulnerable to an inflection point in the economic growth story and is relatively more exposed to building margin pressures.

the markets are now starting to look very weak indeed

today sees bad employment and deficit numbers in usa, and libya looking more and more of a disaster zone with oil refineries being shelled and the rebels losing their grip on two important towns (zaiwah and ras lanuf)

unless something very positive pops out of the woodwork, i am fully expecting dow to have dumped say 250 points by tomorrow's close - but i haven't married money to mouth

Interesting that the DOW & FTSE graphs haven't exactly tracked each other over the last month or so. Looks like the UK is having more domestic problems than the U.S.

your prediction only 60 points off cynic and there's another 30 hours to go! :)

"guru's" stop-loss levels are 11800 (dow) and 5760 (ftse)
will either be triggered?
at the moment dow, is struggling hard to maintain the psychological 12000

long Dow @ 12006

what a dreadful day, with only Morrisons and Anite (just) managing to be blue ...... this is of course always the danger with CFDs if you cannot watch them constantly, which fortunately I can ..... i have ducked sharply and banked a bunch of (reduced) profits ..... just hope it's enough to see it all through until we get a decent bounce - XEL would be a good one to start with!

Only blue I have are NG JLIF GRG & SSE.

on edit:- I must admit to a dabble in MHG which is up - a pure punt.

I wonder if Morrisons would have put on a better performance had the day been blue all round? Their results were pretty good. I had PMG as a winner today, otherwise grim as you say.

out Dow +48

18:40 - dow now down 228 and below 12000 at about 11985

19:50 - dow still clinging on (just) above the psychological 12000 mark at 12020

DOW futures currently -74, so think I will sit on my spare cash until late in the day or even until next week. Looks like the U.S. are more concerned about the Saudi's rather than Libya.

Have a look at Japan......they will not come out of recession now for years with the tidal wave....

in a somewhat ghoulish way, it will be interesting to see how badly the markets react tomorrow on the back of japan and gadaffi's tightening grip in libya

stay very alert ..... bahrain about to declare martial law with support from the saudis ..... news rec'd from my mate who works in saudi and who is quickly beetling back home (bahrain) from his office in saudi

for obvious reasons that info cannot be guaranteed 100% accurate, but would be surprised if it is not

1000 Saudi soldiers enter Bahrain . News flash

Surely the market is likely to see that as a positive? Stability is what the markets like.