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

wee shortypoos @ 12,190.2

looks promising for tomorrow after a decent showing on dow followed by excellent figures from intel after hours

Spot on, Cynic - though I wasn't geared up to take advantage of the rise

you need to go to EOG thread methinks lol!

Big after hours rise on Ftse & Dow ?

Apple!

all very dull and dreary again, though is suspect little volume ..... having opened brightly, ftse is now -36 at 5947, which is vaguely important being below 6000

i suppose we may see some more life once the roi announcement is out and the AV result known - local elections are almost certain to be horrid for tories and lib dems, though my own view is that it was absolutely correct to take hard and fast action to reduce the awful financial mess bequeathed by labour

for myself, at least MRW, BLNX and BAO are performing brightly today

BOE no change.

more bad news from over the pond .....
Number of people filing first-time unemployment claims surges to 474,000 in the latest week, the highest total in 8 months, U.S. says

Tis obvious something has been on the cards for weeks.

Nearly all AIM stocks are having the squeeze put on them similar to the period March 07 to when the subprime news broke in Sept 07. Indeed most stocks are now at best stationary or slipping down. There are exceptions of course but I suspect (and I hope I'm wrong) we have peaked and are slipping away to around the 4800 level

markets are AOTFS (all over the fucking shop!) with Dow currently only down 29 after more than 60

Yes I did understand what you meant!

lol

Are you allowed to AOTFS on here ! :-)

whether you can or not, he has ..

what a truly vile week this has turned into
"guru's" bulletin a couple of days back was quite bullish but suggested stop-loss on any fall with impetus below 5760

AOTFS was almost an understatement ..... Dow has been down about 120 but is now down just 26 ..... but where will it close?

cynic lets face it this has been a very good week Osama bin liner is no longer with us.

yes, but the market was arguably looking for an excuse to retrench/consolidate, so the perceived added danger was as good an excuse as any ..... there's also been some pretty shitty economic numbers from US

or perhaps looking at it cynically the US won't have to spend so much looking for OSB who was always right under their noses...... you wouldn't believe it if you read it in a book.

you forget that wars are a great stimulus to industry and the economy