Well, whaddya know? There was Williams, nodding off in the sunshine on the terrace late yesterday afternoon, thinking of an opening sentence for today's ramblings, and deciding that something along the lines of "After the job losses that have just confirmed it, nothing but divine intervention can now save the USA from a full - blown recession..." - and with a puff of smoke and a flash of light reflected off a gleaming eyeball, who appeared out of nowhere - hovering in mid air in front of my very eyes - but St Tony himself? So everything is going to be just fine - Uncle Sam's economy is safe after all! (If you're wondering what I'm banging on about, it's a reference to Supertone's new jobs, lecturing in the schools of management & divinity at Yale. Words to describe this do not in fact fail me - but this is a family journal - so I'll content myself with just a wee remark about "lunatics being allowed to run the asylum". Truly the stuff of nightmares.)

Anyway, the US recession is beginning to be accepted as a fact by the mainstream press - a tad late as usual of course - and it will come as no surprise to this grizzled old fella if "depression" follows. Given that the "63000 lost jobs" hide the fact that 101000 REAL jobs were lost (the above arithmetic adding up due to the 38,000 posts created by government), things are worse than one might imagine. Add to that the fact that around 340000 construction - related employees have been dumped since late 2006, and that approximately 450000 "jobseekers" have decided to seek no more, removing themselves from the register of unemployed. You might perhaps accept that the term "tip of the iceberg" applies to the newly - announced figures then.

Ah well, Williams has been predicting doom and gloom for years, to which long term sufferers of these mutterings can attest of course - but the "denial" that I've mentioned so often, results in "bad economic news" being suppressed/ignored by people for far, far longer than it should be - which is why in due course things inevitably become worse than they needed to be. Politicians simply refuse to deal in "bad news" - they all trust that with any luck, THEY will be long gone with a fat pension before the stinky stuff hits the rotating thingie. Whatever I might think of St Tony, I can only admire his own impeccable timing in that regard!

Moving along, it seems the Federal Reserve is making an "extra $200bn" of funding available to US banks via their monthly auctions. Seemingly that will save Uncle Sam - so they're not planning totally to depend on divine intervention - but what commentators seem to miss is the other side of the equation. Banks don't currently WANT to borrow any more - because they don't want to LEND. And compounding that fact is that the American consumer too, no longer wants to borrow. THAT is what is going to lead to depression - because the Yanks depend upon "consumption" to keep their economy alive - in the same way as do the Brits. Once people lose their appetite for "buying stuff" then these types of economies tank - how could it be otherwise? Great opportunities ahead for traders, methinks!

Next, and in no kind of order at all, "things" noted by W. during the past week - some scams, some just daft:

Gordon set £100m aside (when he was still openly chancellor) for a "First Time Buyer Initiative" to help people on to the property ladder. So far, after a few years, it seems 451 people have taken this scheme up. Either they each borrowed an awful lot, or the scheme is a total failure.......

Over 1000 laptops have been "lost" by government departments in the last few years according to a parliamentary report.

Some nuclear fuel reprocessing statistics: Mox and Sellafield - last 6 years' target production was 720 tonnes thereof. Actual production: 2.6 tonnes. Cost so far: £470m. Ho hum. You'll no doubt recall earlier Williams comments about "scams" as related to the true costs of nuclear energy. (I'm not against the idea of nuclear power, by the way - the whole "biofuels" thing is a far, far bigger and ultimately much more dangerous scam in my view.)

Drugs companies have been told by the British government to "become more ethical". Ho Ho Ho. That's a good one eh?

A headline: "Home Office and Treasury now owned Offshore" referred to the fact that some of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes that basically own the above buildings, are based in tax havens. Shock, horror eh? The man responsible for condoning such an arrangement should be sacked....name of Brown I believe, first name begins with "G"........

And I must apologise profusely to boozers everywhere after last weekend's mention of possible tax rises to curb binge drinking. Surely Vince Cable must read WICS? If I find his alias I'll make sure he doesn't receive the next password, that's a promise!

Finally today, another headline said "Cold Wind Blows in the Buy to Let Market" - conjuring up images of dodgy landlords refusing to fix broken windows in midwinter.....I love headlines! The reference was to the fact that the UK's biggest property seminar company has ceased offering weekend "make money via buy to let" courses, and has made 40 staff redundant - a sure sign that interest in that market sector is waning fast.

Just before we look at a chart or two, a very good question from one of you (thanks Alf!) needs answering. It was about "DMAs" - Daily Moving Averages - and the question was whether these should be "Simple" (ie arithmetical) or "Exponential" (ie using log scale). Alf's point was that he well understood why I would use "Simple" back in the days when I had to calculate these manually, but nowadays with the charting software doing everything for us, why not try "Exponential"? (Exponential Moving Averages essentially give more weight to recent days, and less to the earlier days, within any specified timescale.) My reply was "It's up to you" - I wasn't in any way being facetious - simply pointing out that TTEW has no monopoly on trading methodologies and there is no harm at all in experimenting. If YOU find that a different way of looking at things works for YOU, then why not use it? Being a simple country yokel, you'll accept however that I'll just keep on keepin' on.....if it ain't broke, why try to fix it?

On to today's charts then, with an update first of the Euromoney one we last looked at here on February 17th this year - just to reinforce the usual Williams "patience" mantra. The ongoing support from November last year has now been well and truly broken. In fact, is it a windfall?? Then we'll examine the chart of Barratt Developments where a triangle in a downtrend is fairly evident - given the state of the property market overall, you might be forgiven for thinking this one could drop even lower! (I'll mention Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey too, in the text accompanying the Barratt chart). Then we'll take a look at the Dow Jones (DJIA) index, and finally there's a chart of the FTSE100.

OK - that's the lot for the moment then - as mentioned in recent video clips, the hard drive in this computer tried to give up the unequal struggle earlier last week and only some great 'techie' work via the phone (thanks, John in the UK & Nigel in France!) resuscitated it on a temporary basis - I daren't turn it off at the moment - so if you don't receive mentoring replies over the coming week you'll know why! A new hard drive plus a thingie called a 'caddie' is in the post and there will be some work ahead methinks....aaaghhh. At least the caddie is not golf related! But I have also been pointed in the direction of some fancy technology (by Colin, my superb and incredibly patient webmaster) that SHOULD enable programmes as well as files to be moved - so with a bit of luck and a fair wind, the process may be less onerous than I expect. Carburettors and crankshafts are technology I can deal with - and I'm OK with hammers too - but computers are well beyond me! Anyway, all being well, all will be well by next weekend, so happy trading until then.

Ian.

'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'.