Well, there you go then - Williams takes his eye off the ball for just a few days, and look what happens! It (the 'biggish drop') was all my fault of course. At least that's what one or two of you seem to think now that stock markets appear to have ended their seemingly relentless upwards climb. It certainly proves the absolute necessity of using stop losses, eh? When you're in 'buy' trades, an overall market correction of such relative speed and magnitude will almost certainly take you out of open positions - that is simply part of the 'deal' in this business I'm afraid.

So did last week's action mark the end of bullish activity? Not at all - it only indicated that 'the change' to which I occasionally allude, is gathering pace and is perhaps becoming slightly more evident to a greater number of people, as it begins to accelerate a little. Why do I say that? Simply because the bulls won't give up that easily - they never do. "A great buying opportunity" is their current line, and there's little doubt that the markets will rebound, perhaps fairly significantly, in the coming week. (It's likely though that they may drop a little lower before the bounce comes.)

More evidence that 'the change' is gathering pace can be found in the USA, where not only are mortgage companies now tightening up their lending criteria to a considerable degree, but a Pittsburgh bank (Metro Savings) has been forced to close its doors for good - and not all its depositors are going to get their money back by any means. The sub - prime mortgage industry of course has been in dire straits for over two years (as you'll know if you have been a WICS subscriber over that period) but it's only recently that Joe Public seems to be waking up to the fact. Once more banks go bust and more depositors start losing their nest eggs, you can expect to see a snowball effect gathering pace a whole lot quicker than you might imagine.

Outwith the mortgage market too, some of the huge commercial banks/stockbrokers/financial wizards in the USA are (all of a sudden) not looking so robust - Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup.......hmm - interesting.

In percentage terms, the price drops last week weren't actually all that enormous and in my view they're meantime little more than a wake - up call which the bulls (who are still in a huge majority) will simply ignore - so I wouldn't be getting overly excited yet about selling the market.

£18bn was added during the week to the pension fund deficits of the FTSE100 components - but nobody among the trustees seems to be bothered. Ah well, give them another few months and their complacency will vanish.

It was interesting to note that Lloyds TSB seems to have woken up at long last to the fact that customers don't much care for offshore call centres - will that mean better service? Who knows? - it is a bank after all.

On then to today's charts, and in view of the recent price drops we'll have a look at the FTSE250 - I haven't covered it for some time for the simple reason that it's an expensive place in which to play, between spread costs and the need to keep stop losses very wide - and I'm aware that not everyone is motivated to trade it. However, its chart currently lets us look at the correct way to draw trendlines, and there's a clear downside probe thereof too. Then we'll look again at Experian where last weekend we spoke about a triangle, and you'll see both the (expected) upside breakout as well as some 'triangle support' following the ensuing market drop.

OK - that's all for today - expect an upwards bounce in most - if indeed not all - markets during the next week or two, and then we'll get a better picture as to when the REAL drop is going to begin in earnest, but as suggested above, there HAS been a bit of a wake - up call at long last, albeit we need to be pretty careful not to get carried away meantime, in either direction.

All the best then, till the 11th.

Ian.