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

Students are more important. Some have already done and many other universities are starting to do it.

???????????????????????

Sorry, I meant, many universities plan to use iPad as standard for students. It is already happening in some of well-known universities in the US.

sp is rocketing away, AAPL having been upgraded by a number of brokers ...... in fact, i have (yet again) banked profits on half, but i know i shall buy them back in due course, even is sp is higher but it looks the right thing to do

GBP Services PMI 55.3 v consensus 53.5 previous 53.8

what a vile day .... hopefully just final twitches for squaring y/e books etc

I think the realisation that there may be no QE3 isn't helping.

The GBP service sector numbers released today are good.

please shout it out in the city like the muezzin!

lets go together. it's not possible alone.

USD ISM Non-Manufacturing PMI 56.0 v consensus 56.9 previous 57.3

what a totally shitty day, so let's just hope it's just a quick shake down for UK y/e and easter holiday break coming up

at least i sold 50% of AAPL yesterday and resisted the temptation to dabble in GOOG

Pissing me off big time is this market.....

It's all macro issues driving the market. I suppose there's been a double whammy with the Fed's statement about QE, and Eurozone issues flaring up again with Spain's failed bond auction. Any positive news is being ignored for the moment.. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17611764

yet another tree shake to generate some volume.

Sadly, looking a big grim in Spain!:
"an auction of Spanish government bonds this morning didn’t go according to plan. The country issued €2.59bn in short to medium-term debt, but the target range had been between €2.5 and €3.5bn. In other words, investors weren’t very keen to buy.

Recent news on Spain has been grim, with the new government coming under pressure from its Eurozone peers to revise down its budget deficit target for 2012 even as unemployment rises.

Figures released yesterday revealed that Spanish unemployment had risen by nearly 40,000 to hit 4.75m people or 23.6% of the workforce. Over half of young people in Spain do not have a job."

HOw does it compare with this time last year?

Not well, really!!



Chart from http://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/directory?hl=en&dl=en

Hmmm - GBP Manufacturing Production m/m -1.0% v consensus 0.1% previous 0.1%

hence market sell-off, though more of a wobble than anything else ...... i think the markets accept that double-dip is now less than unlikely despite inevitable hiccoughs along the way