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

i'm happy to be short dow, ftse and asc but it won't remotely offset losses on the balance of my portfolio

us jobs tomorow, feds weekend, us volatility index at highest this year, official bull market 20% correction made, been listening to traders NYSE floor and say the stage for snap face rally can be in the making..

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I see South American & Asia Pacific markets also dropped 3-4% in sympathy! Grim.

Yields going sky high. Even French German and Belgium

Now - 155 at start

I've downgraded and classified my spreads account into : "a just for fun account" in my mind......and the normal account also has been downgraded to "oh !, what the hell-account".......

terrordome

all eyes def on wall street this afternoon to see how the market reacts to the employment figures ...... logic says that all the bad news is already built in, but given that some very good company results were totally ignored yesterday, i wouldn't want to bet on it

clearly the markets remain far from convinced that any recovery today is very likely

Surely it's all down to the non-farm figures expected later? Wouldn't want to anticipate them, but may be a late ray of sunshine today.

you're right, and i shall continue to manfully resist the siren calls of the current recovering prices until after 13:30

I've heard that if the US markets stabilise then we will probably recover some ground as people won't want to be short going into the weekend just in case the Euro politicians get their act together and have some sort of plan by Monday.

Conversely, if the US drops again then we could have market capitulation. In that case I could see a suspension looming although for a trader it may be manor from heaven!

There have been opportunities even with shares this am.

AFR (if nimble enough); PDX; CHAR; VGM; RKH; POG and HOIL spring to mind.

someone dropping bricks on you then DD??
and yes, you could have successfully traded this morning if you had been supremely brave and/or foolish, especially on the indices ..... in fact, in closing my ftse short, i accidentally double-clicked so ended up long and made a couple of shillings that way - which is now banked

Yes I am brave here.

Most of the time it does indeed slip into foolishness but there were too many opportunites yesterday and today to miss.

So far CHAR is the one that has paid for my therapy!

Only -98 now :-)

Closeds a small long +80 - seems to be coming off now.

clearly employment numbers were at least reasonable as shown by jump in indices

Double the number of jobs created than expected. Big bounce, followed by some relief profit taking possibly?

NON Farm.
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