Well, it's great to know that following Grumpy Uncle Gordon's final budget, "Stability is now locked in to the British economy" according to that intellectual colossus, John McFall MP. All of you who live in Blighty must be mightily relieved to hear that, although methinks the 'lock' has been set well after the economic horses have bolted. I recall asking some time ago in WICS, "Where has all the money gone?" and I still await a satisfactory answer. (WICS of 4th December 2005 if you're masochistic enough to want to revisit it.) Anyway, there's no point in rehashing all the budget - related blurb here because you'll be well and truly fed up with it by now and you probably took all of thirty seconds to work out the sheer cynicism of Gordon's exercise.

Moving along, I see Substandard Life (one of my favourite companies and just SO well run....not) is ditching another 1000 jobs, making the redundancy tally 5500 over the last three years. All the more 'added value' for shareholders then....or maybe all the more in the pension pots of those at the top?

And it pains me to note that yet another ostensibly Scottish company is truly plumbing the depths - if you work for Royal Bank of Scotland, you won't be paid unless you have a bank account with them. It's scarcely believable but there again, RBS does have the reputation of being the most ruthless shower within a thoroughly ruthless industry. Gosh, what with Gordon and these two paragons of corporate greed, it's hard to admit to being a Scot these days - but honestly, we're not all like that - and if you say we are, I'll get my claymore down from the rafters and come looking for you.........

Outside Scotland, Barclays and ABN Amro (Dutch bank) are getting together to "Create value for both sets of shareholders." Ho Ho.

Moving on to the markets, it's still a bit of a limbo situation overall and pretty hard to tell just what will happen over the next week or two - certainly there's a fair probability that US markets such as the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 will make a serious attempt at achieving new highs before they finally roll over and fall down the other side of the mountain, whereas in Europe the chances of new highs are not that good, and the eventual drop will come sooner than in the USA.

You know I mention 'patience' rather a lot (type the word into the WICS search engine and you'll see what I mean!) and now is certainly a very good time for you to get in some practice cultivating that most essential of trading attributes. When things are racking along in a rather indeterminate manner it's a very good idea just to sit back and relax, and only look at what might be termed the 'more obvious' chart formations. When the trends begin again, there will be plenty viable trades to be had, as was ever the case. Don't be in a rush! (And by doing proper research you'll still find things to occupy you - the chart below of Tate & Lyle is a good example - my thanks to David B. for having reminded me to include it this weekend.)

Anent my suggestion that the USA indices have some more 'upside' left in them, there's a chart of the S&P 500 to help you see what I mean - just remember that indices generally need wide stop losses and thus deepish pockets to trade. Don't be tempted to trade them if you know you can't afford the stop loss, because what you'll do (I KNOW you will!) is keep the SL way too tight and lose money hand over fist. There's no arrogance in my saying that to you by the way - I too have "Been there, read the book, watched the movie, bought the T shirt......" That's the reason why I tend never (well, seldom) to mention the FTSE250 any more - it's nicely tradeable often enough, BUT it costs a lot in spreads IF you can get a price for it at all from a spread bet company, and it needs very wide SLs - too many of you good people have had your wallets badly burnt by it and I certainly don't seek to encourage that - hey, I need some of your money when WICS subscription time arrives! However, the S&P 500 at the moment looks like a wide SL would be fairly unnecessary - have a look for yourself.

Anyway, that's all for this weekend I'm afraid - our Irish friends who were with us last week left us a wee present in the form of a nasty 'flu bug - sadly, they were suffering from it by the last three days of their trip and now it's our turn. Every time people visit via either Stavrosjet or Paddyair they seem to bring along something like that and I'm convinced it's to do with lack of hygiene in the budget airlines - safety might not be an issue but the planes are never on the tarmac long enough properly to flush the aircon and that's a known breeding ground for all sorts of bugs. Yuk.

On that note, I trust I'll still be around to talk to you again next weekend....hypochondriac? Moi? Anyway, there has been a massive dump of fresh snow and sunny skies are predicted to arrive by Tuesday or Wednesday so I guess I'll be able to force myself to carve some fresh tracks later in the week - that should cure these old bones! (And a hot toddy won't go amiss either.)

All the best till next weekend.

Ian.