Well, the Easter Bunnies of the past couple of weeks have now given way to White Rabbits - as in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - or do I mean Wee Allie's Misadventures in Blunderland perhaps? The UK's pretend chancellor is certainly running around in his own surreal little fantasy world at the moment! It's quite hard to accept that he actually believes a single word he says - but there again, he's only a poor wee ventriloquist's dummy without a single independent thought in his head. The whole budget thing has already been done to death by the media of course, so the only things that might be worth adding here, are that a) the 50% income tax rate on the "wealthy" will raise hardly anything at all, but it certainly sounds good to Sam and Sally Sheep in the runup to the next election, and b) the REAL tax hikes will come AFTER said election, no matter which sorry bunch gets the chance to mess things up even further - and these coming tax hikes will affect everyone, not just the top 1% of earners. Nothing is more certain than that! As per last weekend's ramblings, tax hikes take money out of the economy and make the downwards spiral even worse, and on top of that, it's clear enough that public spending is going to be massively cut after the election - so a whole load of the Keynesian plans (try "Keynes" in the search engine if you have an hour or two to spare...) being put forward recently, just ain't gonna happen. Methinks that will include all the fancy (pre election) talk about spending zillions to make the UK a cleaner, greener place. And as for the £2000 bribe to change your car....oh dear. Mention has been made here before about the wrongheadedness of that silly little project and frankly I can't be bothered going through the arguments again. "Buy electric", and bring on the coal fired power stations! But some government minister is claiming he won't let these be built unless they utilise "clean" technology. Ho ho ho - if you can be bothered, just read the small print of the planning documents.......and if you're a true masochist, try "coal" in the search engine!

Still in the land of Lewis Carroll, we see that bankers don't really need to concern themselves much about future bonuses - they're simply awarding themselves huge salary increases. Did anyone believe that WOULDN'T happen? Ho ho ho - and they'll probably remove themselves to Dublin so that Wee Allie's 50% tax rate bothers them not a jot. (Not that any extra tax that might become available to the Irish from that kind of relocation, will make any difference to the viability of the Republic - it's totally bankrupt and will soon enough need to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout.)

Speaking of the IMF- the other weekend, son number one "forced" his loving parents to watch a DVD with him that he had brought home from his last trip to Blighty. It was called "Mission Impossible Three" and featured just about the worst "actor" on the planet, along with a story line that was complete rubbish - but it was amusing to hear Mr Cruise tell someone that he "worked for the IMF" - as in "Impossible Mission Force". Nearer the truth than one might like, perhaps! Certainly the real IMF is going to have a serious problem raising enough dosh to cover all the begging letters it's going to receive over the next year or two - a pretty impossible mission indeed.

And as regards bailouts, it looks like Chrysler has sent its last begging letter to the Obama one, and that it will go "officially" bankrupt in the next week or two - but Fiat (again, a word for the search engine?) will probably buy some of the better bits, along (possibly) with GM's Vauxhall and Opel brands - a good example perhaps of allowing dinosaurs to die off, thus permitting stronger, better entities to evolve? (Try "dinosaurs" too in the search engine.)

Anyway, onward to a few small snippets - and another word for the search engine is "Donington". Seemingly the owners of the circuit are owed over £2.5m in rent arrears by the bunch that will allegedly stage a Grand Prix there.......Then there's the (landlocked) Canadian Province of Alberta's newly acquired coastline - what a scam! (A tourist office brochure to try to pretend Alberta isn't a dirty province that's allowing its tar sands to be dug up on a massive scale, features a picture of a Northumbrian beach....) And of course the Broon one has to get a wee mention in almost every IW rant - this time he qualifies for two cardboard stars. First (anent the 50% tax rate on high earners) he suggested "This is a tax for a purpose..." Hmm, so all other taxes are NOT for a purpose then? And while ensuring that pension pots above a certain amount will lose all tax relief, he also made sure that the new rules would NOT apply to members of the House of Commons.....what a sleazy little con man he is! And has Porsche actually bought VW, or has VW acquired Porsche? Step forward, all conspiracy theorists!

Moving along to matters perhaps more useful to everyone suffering these mutterings, a big "welcome" to the several recent newcomers to this nonsense, and a wee reminder to everyone to have a good read of the manual - don't forget that the general "IW notion" is to try to help YOU learn the "how to" of financial trading, so that in due course you too might be able to make an independent living in this fantastic environment. I welcome your emails and I love being able to assist wherever possible - all that's asked is that YOU do a wee bit of thinking too, rather than just asking for "tips". Tips will never make you independent, of that there is not the slightest doubt. Only YOU can make yourself independent, and on the journey towards that goal, you may be sure I'll willingly guide the way as best I can.

On that note, onward to a chart or two, and tonight we'll start with that of Rightmove, where there's pretty clear horizontal resistance to be seen, as well as an upwards - pointing triangle. Then we'll look at a horizontal channel on the Morgan Crucible chart and we'll see why a "buy" order might make more sense than a "sell" order. Next there's an update of the "potential trend change" situation on the Spirax Sarco chart - refer to WICS of 18th January this year for a bit of background. Finally there's an update of the DJIA (Dow Jones) index from WICS of 29th March - is there a case for moving a potential stop loss a tad higher now?

And that's your lot for this weekend - I now need to persuade my England - based daughter to go for the £2000 allowance and trade in her Fiat Uno for a Porsche Cayenne Turbo - you've got to be environmentally friendly after all......who cares about fuel consumption and the burden of hire purchase? Aaghh....

All the best till next weekend! (And don't worry - daughter loves her wee Uno!)

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'.