Hello again - a fairly brief WICS today - at least as far as text is concerned. The reason is either because there has been very little going on that's new (pretty much par for the course at this time of year) or because the weather is warm, settled, calm and overcast and the presence of bluefin tuna has been reported very near the coast just along from my summer location. You decide which is the more valid excu...sorry, reason.

Seriously, not an awful lot is new as regards the markets - 'gloom and doom' is slowly but surely spreading and that of course is inevitable in my own view. I note that Grant Thornton (a major accountant & insolvency practice) is saying UK personal bankruptcies are now averaging 9000 per month, up from 2500 five years ago. And you'll have read of course that despite massive overall profits, the big banks are making huge extra provision for bad debt. The latest interest rate hike (certainly not the last one either) won't be helping anyone except the relatively few who hold big credit balances at their bank.

Lots of property - related fraud is being reported in the USA, with many mortgages seeming to bear no relation whatever to the actual valuation - plenty more of that to surface, I suspect, possibly also in the UK. It was a big thing back in the late 1980s/early 1990s when more than one solicitor, bank manager, and surveyor found their cosy little (fraudulent) triumvirate failed to survive the attentions of the law once 'negative equity' had begun to dominate the property market. Ah well, probably once they got out they set up an estate agency so they wouldn't have been too short of a crust when the next property boom began.

Anyway, enough of my cynicism for now.

The charts today are to illustrate another 'TTEW lesson' - that DMAs are great for managing open trades, but that during certain phases of price development, they mean very little indeed, and that during such phases they should be totally ignored - for example within triangles, channels and the like. Once a potential trade has been identified, if it is eventually filled, you'll find that the DMAs have started once again to act 'correctly' but most often at the actual IDENTIFICATION stage you'll find that the DMAs could well be all over the place. Hard to explain in words - as you know, I'm a 'visual' kind of trader - so let's examine three charts below and I'll try to explain what I mean on them.

And if you feel you have been 'short - changed' this weekend - tough! (Seriously of course, given that you can email the mentoring service to discuss matters and ask for reasonable assistance with what you're seeing or not seeing, you're not that badly done by, now are you? And bluefin tuna don't come within range every weekend!)