Hello again - and "advance apologies" for a somewhat truncated offering this weekend. The Williams entourage arrived back at our holiday cottage yesterday evening after several months' absence, to find that the Internet "service" that we "suspended" while we were away (to save an unnecessary €58.95 a month, in true Scots fashion) wasn't in fact suspended, despite assurances at the time from the ISP in question, but was cancelled. Ho hum. It was never much of a service in the first place anyway - a truly weird amalgam of satellite download but dialup upload. Today I'm having to use a neighbour's connection and it is crawling along at the massive speed of 22Kps. (Just to put that in context if you're not familiar with such matters, my connection at home runs at 1000 Kps - without using up the phone line either - at a massive cost of €24.95!) Anyway, it's more than likely there are going to be 'issues' with the connection here, and since we've disposed of the place as of the end of November there's little point in my researching anything better - tomorrow I trust someone will answer my ISP's "helpline" and I'll get the previous connection reinstated - although I'm not banking on it. Perhaps by next weekend it might be OK again.

Anyway, apologies as above for the inevitably delayed responses to your emails - I really dislike being tardy when I'm supposed to be at my desk and providing support to you good people.

Fortunately enough, there's little new to talk about this weekend - markets keep rising in the belief that whenever they start to drop, interest rates will be cut, thus theoretically making companies more profitable and their stock all the more valuable. Hah!

"City bonuses will fall and financial sector jobs will be lost" - a report during the week from the Centre for Economy and Business Research - a great title for whatever quango it happens to be. How about giving it a more accurate name - something like the Centre for Stating the Bloomin' Obvious, for example?

Next, note the imminent danger of a reflating dotcom bubble - a whole bunch of utterly unviable startups have been attracting investment cash these past few weeks - never underestimate the ability of venture capital companies to lose their clients' money. How about ZocDoc.com? They allegedly arrange medical appointments for you online, and despite having only 2% of New York's dentists available, and no GPs, they have obtained funding. Hmm - should I try to get a piece of that action? Maybe I'll miss out badly if I don't.......Oh - on a similar topic, it seems there are a whole load of share tipsters on the go again. Refer to the manual please, if you can't recall the Williams view thereof.

A profits warning from Rank - all the fault of the smoking ban of course, and nothing to do with diabolically bad management over the years......

And finally, Northern Rock has been saved by a knight in shining armour then! Fantastic news - almost a dream ending in fact with Sir Richard riding to the rescue........hang on, isn't his proposed "£400m injection" maybe a tad on the miniscule side? What percentage is that of the £13bn debt hanging over the (C)rock? Nonetheless, everybody is breathing a somewhat premature sigh of relief, and the share price is rising, isn't it? Dream on.....

Okay, a chart or two then and today we'll look at Euromoney, last featured here on 23rd September ref 'horizontal support/resistance', and Savills, last examined on 12th August ref 'dynamic' resistance. Finally we'll ask where the FTSE100 might be heading now, after it so kindly co-operated with last weekend's WICS view.

That's all for this weekend - please note that I'll be away between Tuesday midday (16th October) and Wednesday evening (17th October) so I won't be answering emails between those times. What laughingly passes for "normal service" from this location will be resumed thereafter and there should be no more interruptions till the removal van arrives at the end of November - oh happy day!

All the best then till next weekend

Ian.

PS - the usual ISP difficulties with the likes of hotmail, yahoo, ntlworld, tesco etc - as noted in your 'WICS welcome' email - may well be even more of a hassle over the coming weeks due to my own ISP here, and I cannot stress enough that you NEED to add the TTEW email addresses to your 'whitelist' so as to ensure receipt of mentoring replies. Indeed, it might be a very good idea if you have one of the addresses referred to, to consider changing to a (free of charge) gmail address. To date, there have been NO problems therewith. If you have a couple of minutes to spare, please visit http://mail.google.com/mail/signup

 

'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'