Leezen vairree kerfullee - eh weel zay zees hoanlay waance.........seems Ol' Grumpy himself has fallen for the charms of one Mme Sarko then. It appears she has acquired a job as some kind of saviour of the UK - it's strange that St Tony wasn't offered the position though - not good looking enough....? According to a government minister, "The answer to a wide swath of social and economic problems facing Britain may lie in adopting a more French approach". Yes indeed. One imperious twirl of a Gallic digit (as in Gordy, wrapped round someone's little finger) and all will be well in Blighty. "Comme par magie" - there goes the Northern Wreck problem. "Pouf" - it's goodbye to binge drinking. "Et voilà!" - the railway network runs to perfection, complete with waiter service on all trains. Oops - sorry! I try only to discuss matters economic in these ramblings, but the above scenario is just too silly to ignore - and matters economic DO in fact apply, because Gordy has spent pretty much all of the past ten years badmouthing the French economy while ramping up his story about the "Anglo Saxon economic model" and his own "burillyantly purrrroodent" development thereof to make UK Plc a role model for mainland Europe. Not that I could be remotely bothered, you understand, but methinks a wee trawl through Hansard would come up with more than one reference by the Brown one, to the "sclerotic" French economy.......now you might get the impression from the above that Williams is a tad cynical about the current Brit - French love - in. You would be 100% correct of course - and I daresay you feel pretty much the same way yourself. I absolutely love France - always have done, unlike some of the current converts - and have no doubt that once the true effects of the credit crunch have worked their way through the entire fabric of society, the French economic model will be seen to have stood up far better to a deflationary recession than that of the massively over - borrowed UK. But the idea that the Brits will somehow see all their current travails banished by "becoming more like the French" is just so nonsensical that I simply had to mention it here......OF COURSE it can't work, folks - the edible snail is a protected species in the UK for goodness' sake!

Anyway, moving rapidly on, but still speaking about government ministers, it seems the UK aviation secretary berated British Airways (anent the current T5 difficulties) for providing "an unacceptably poor travel experience." A British junior transport minister having a go at "poor transport" - what next? Maybe he should take a wee look in the mirror and have a word with himself about the road and rail network in la belle Grande Bretagne? Re Terminal Five and the current wee luggage location difficulties, it was amusing to note that the Europe - bound "mislaid" baggage is being transported for sorting to Milan - by lorry. It only takes 24 hours to get there. One of the drivers is a Campbell I gather - first name Naomi.

And still on the topic of Britain versus France, Centrica is in a right strop at the moment. It appears that these nasty Europeans buy up North Sea gas in the summer months, when it's cheap(ish). They store it till the colder months and then sell it back to the Brits at a higher price. My goodness - that kind of behaviour verges on the criminal. Maybe Williams is being a tad thick here, but is there any reason why the likes of Centrica couldn't have built more storage facilities in the UK? Or has "farming out" such boring things been part of the Anglo Saxon business model for too many years?

Next today, another wee mention of the whole "biofuels" nonsense. (Type the word into the WICS search engine for earlier references.) It seems at last to be getting noticed that the only beneficiaries thereof are the global corporations that actually run the world, despite what politicians would have us believe. What a great wheeze - European biofuels get tankered across the Atlantic, where a few litres of Yank fuel (not necessarily bio!) gets added. That minor action qualifies the entire tanker load for a US subsidy of 11p a litre - whereupon it's brought back to Europe for retail sale. Is that environmentally friendly or what? And throughout the third world, food crops are being abandoned on a largish scale as big agricultural conglomerates turn to biofuels production - and rain forests are being cut down to provide even more cropping land. Rice is getting scarce and has doubled in price - a great recipe for socioeconomic stability, eh? You have to wonder if everyone in government is totally nuts - no answer is required!

Moving on, the CBI seems to reckon that around 11,000 financial sector jobs may be lost due to the credit crunch. Methinks if the final figure is only 110,000 it will be a bit of a miracle - but they can go to work with the FSA I suppose - or as Playground Facilitators....oops - maybe not. It seems the government is still selling off playing fields. Aaggh.

And it's reported that four pubs a day in the UK are calling 'time' for good (according to the Beer and Pub Association) - maybe they'll be replaced by French cafés?

Anyway, all is not doom and gloom. "The bear market is reaching a bottom" quoth a "Head of Derivatives" at some investment company or other during the week. "Investors are saying the worst is over." What utter tosh. As mentioned previously in these ramblings, "bad news" is being leaked out in dribs and drabs. Sure, we saw a massive writedown by UBS during the week - far more than anyone had previously admitted - but if anyone thinks that the bad news is now all out in the open, then they also believe that Elvis Presley will be running for the vacancy left by Elliott Spitzer. (Governor of New York State until a minor indiscretion the other week).

Staying with New York for a moment, it was amusing to listen to the president of the Big Apple's branch of the Fed the other day - referring to the Bear Stearns fiasco and the toxic waste mess in general at a Senate hearing: "What produced this is a complicated mixture of factors. I don't think anyone fully understands it yet..." Ho Ho. What's to understand? Money was way too easy to borrow. Banks lent to NINJAs (for newcomers to WICS, please use the search engine - type 'NINJA' and/or 'toxic waste' and you'll find loads of references). Banks "valued" their mortgage portfolio any way they wanted to, with no input from auditors. Then they themselves borrowed massively against the "security" of said portfolios, in low interest currencies like the Yen, in order to lend out even more to others with minimal ability to repay - but they packaged up some of the debt and sold it on to pension funds, hedge funds, life insurance companies and so on, so they themselves appeared to have passed the parcel for a time. But at the bottom of the house of cards is Joe Ninja - and when it becomes clear that he has nae chance whatever of repaying his borrowings, that particular card falls over - and we all know what happens then! (That's a bit oversimplified of course, but it's not exactly rocket science either - although doubtless well beyond your average politician.)

Next, it must be great to be able to count like a Yank statistician. The "Non Farms Payroll" figure for February came in at "minus 63000" when these USA employment numbers were announced at the end of the month in question. Not very good news - but amazingly, they have now been revised to "minus 76000" - which doesn't sound that bad now, when compared to the March figure of "minus 80000". A good massage - everyone needs one from time to time!

Finally today before we look at a chart or two, it seems I have offended one of you by being "too academic". To be accused of THAT is certainly a first for Williams, it has to be said. My old Professor will be turning in his grave - laughing his socks off. But on a serious note, the person in question was suggesting that there seems little need for him to trawl through charts when IW has years of experience in doing just that - and that I should be pointing people more directly towards potential trades. In fairness however, he did suggest that maybe he was missing the point. Oh yes.

Anyway, on that note, let's have a wee look today at the chart of Soco International, by way of showing you a great example of "horizontal" support and resistance. These are extremely important aspects of the TTEW methodology, and if you're newish to these ramblings, please type either (or both) 'support' and 'resistance' into the search engine. If things are still a bit confusing, drop me an email! In fact, all today's charts are about support and resistance, by way of helping you identify such things.The next chart (of Aggreko) shows "rolling" support along a DMA - "rolling" can also be termed "dynamic" because unlike horizontal support, the price here is changing over time. Finally you'll see a different kind of dynamic support and resistance, this time along the bottom and top lines of a triangle on the chart of Stagecoach. As mentioned above, please use the search engine - that's what it's there for - but if you're still a bit confused by such an academic approach to trading, drop me an email - I'm always more than happy to hear from you.

And on that note, it's time for my Sunday afternoon stroll to a pavement café, so all the best until next weekend.

Ian.

PS - as always when I change passwords, the usual suspects cause problems. (I refer not to subscribers of course, but to aol, hotmail, ntlworld and the like.) If YOU have an email address using any of these webmail thingies, please ensure you have added mentor@trading-the-easy-way.com to your address book - it doesn't happen automatically! Thanks for your assistance with this. Googlemail (aka gmail) causes no problems, by the way, and costs nothing to set up, bar a couple of minutes of your time....

'IMPORTANT NOTICE: These WICS charts are for EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. They represent only MY understanding of what is happening in the market for any particular share, stock, commodity or index. In NO circumstances should they be construed as recommendations to trade. If I choose to trade what I see, that is MY decision. YOU must, in turn, come to YOUR OWN conclusions about what action, if any, YOU might choose to take'.