Hello again, and welcome to another somewhat truncated WICS this weekend - I have managed to re - acquire the trapped nerve that resulted from my winter argument with our back door steps and typing is proving more than a little painful! I could tell you the injury recurred from my attempted emulation of Paul Young (actor and angling writer), fighting a giant bluefin tuna on a fly rod, or I could of course just admit the truth - which is that it serves me right for acting the goat (mountain goat?) with our neighbours' children, trying to demonstrate a 'wheelie' on a mountain bike that was maybe just a wee bit on the small side for me - my physical age might be umpty - something but my mental age is still somewhere around eight - possibly going on ten if you're being charitable.

Anyway, the fact is that there is very little to report in any event - the 'dog days' of August bedevil markets every bit as much as they do the keen angler, and little will happen till early September at the earliest.

The only (economic) headline of any interest during the week was "BOE (Bank of England) Signals That Rates Could Rise Again" - as if that were actually news!

The other story that caught my attention was that the use of flat screen tellies and their inevitable DVD add - ons will mean the equivalent of two new nuclear power stations will be required to handle Britain's extra power needs from such gadgets alone, by 2016. Don't whinge to me if your electricity bills soar as a result of that kind of waste! Gosh, I can be nasty when I'm hurting.

As far as charts go this weekend, I thought it would be a good idea to continue the Burren Energy one from last weekend, and expand a little on 'Rolling Support' since it's a pretty good example thereof - as is the current look of the Abbot Group chart. Often, you'll see reinforcement of a pattern's development when you note such rolling ('dynamic') support or resistance, whether along channel lines, or along a DMA, or contained within triangle lines. Obviously, as with all such things, you only see these after the event, but if they point towards 'something else' that's perhaps about to occur, then they tend to reinforce the probable strength of that 'something else'.

In the case of both Burren and Abbot below, I refer to the possibility of the channel 'up' probe and subsequent retrace, being followed by a push to the upside.

Note please that both these companies are 'oil exploration' related - Abbot is a service company and Burren is an exploration outfit - it's well worth noting that you should never trade more than two such closely related charts because otherwise you might be exposed to an unreasonable number of simultaneous stopouts - I trust you can work out why for yourself.

Finally today, we'll look at the AGA chart to see if there might be a 'sell' trade brewing.

And that's all for this weekend - please note that due to my webmaster's commitments, next weekend's WICS won't be online until some time on Monday 21st August, so my best wishes until then - hopefully this trapped nerve will have sorted itself out again by then, assisted perhaps by a wee medicinal dram or three. (Honestly, I don't really drink that much - I spill most of it.)

Ian.

PS - on the Burren chart below, I see I have labelled 'Rolling Support' as 'RR' but I ought to have called it 'RS' of course. Forgive me for not deleting and redrawing the chart - I'm sure it will cause no real problem if I leave it 'as is'. ('RR' of course would represent 'Rolling Resistance' which doubtless you can also see, earlier along the channel line.)