Oops - knuckles rapped for IW then! A couple of messages arrived after last weekend's rant, suggesting that the senders had not the slightest interest in the state of German motorways and that I should stick to my knitting and only discuss matters of interest to you good folk. And here I was, all set to have a wee "go" at the Swiss this weekend..... Oh dear - suitably chastened (not...), it's onward then to a fairly brief and to the point ramble this weekend. (Can a "ramble" actually be "to the point"? - oops - straying again, Williams!)

Anyway, not a lot has changed since last weekend - other than the password to access this nonsense of course - and it's "business as usual" - especially for the financial sector, which is back to its old tricks as if nothing unpleasant had happened at all these past months, bonus culture and all. It was good to see Scotland in number one position for something - RBS is right at the top of the tree - the biggest ever banking loss in history: $59.3bn, above even Citigroup in the USA. Shame they couldn't have just made it to the round number of $60bn eh.

Speaking of bonuses, even the Financial Services Agency is getting in on the act - to the tune of £20m worth, and a Mr Crosby (failed HBoS exec who then got hired by the FSA for some extremely weird reason) was handed £63000 for being big - hearted enough to resign........awards for failure, eh? The biggest example at the moment is the new BP head honcho - pretty good work after having made a total mess at that other well - known oil company, Ericsson..... and as regards the "rewards" package for the new RBS guy - for sure he will have a serious challenge to earn his alleged £15m, but there again, maybe the goalposts will simply be moved in due course to make it look like the UK taxpayer is getting "value"...... Listen, Broon/Darling - I'll do the job at a 50% discount - in fact, as a "summer special" now that the good weather seems finally to have arrived, there would be an extra 10% discount for payment up front.

Still with jobs (or the lack thereof) it appears that some of these nice "recruitment companies" that the UK government has been showering with cash to get people back to work via the ludicrous "Flexible New Deal" scheme, have been doing just a teeny bit of fiddling - hard to believe of course, but there you go. But at least the FSA is still hiring - it wants to add another 280 "stable door pushers - shut" to its ranks.

Moving along, Sainsbury's is going to stop using carboard boxes to package its breakfast cereals - will that mean lower prices for the consumer? Hmm..... and UK energy companies seemingly are not passing on recent savings in wholesale prices to the customer. Gosh. Over in the USA, a consultancy (Terrachoice) alleges that 98% of all "eco friendly" packaging on Yank supermarket shelves is "making totally false claims". Only 98%? Is ANY American advert remotely honest? The stuff they get away with is totally unbelievable.

Still in the USA, it seems that executives within the companies represented by the S&P500, have spent most of June selling about $2.5bn worth of their own shares, against only $125m of purchases. Would they be in a position to know the state of their companies? Not always, that's for sure - but nonetheless they know a heck of a lot more than do the patsies who are being sold the stuff! It's pretty clear that "insiders" are using the bear market rally to lighten their load and dump stuff at better than expected prices - a situation that will continue for a while yet methinks. The Moms and Pops are being tempted in by the snake oil salesmen - as indeed are far too many so - called "professionals" - like pension fund managers. Sadly, it's going to end in tears before bedtime. Despite all the huge amount of bleating to the contrary, this is only a bear market rally - a big one, but still just a dead cat bounce for all that. Speaking of "bleating" - the one bit of last week's ramble that seemed to strike a chord, was "David's" contribution anent psychology and pessimism/optimism/depression. If YOU feel like dropping me a note along similar lines, feel free. In fact, a while back when I was still pretending to be a City type, there was a brilliant cartoon in one of these pink papers that used to go out to "financial sector workers" - maybe they still do for all I know. Anyway, had I known I was eventually going to pretend to get involved in helping others to become traders, I would have kept that cartoon - it was just so telling! The first picture had a crowd of people on the Stock Exchange floor, all shouting "Sell! Sell!" at each other and into phones. A guy was sitting in the corner, quietly chatting on the phone: "OK dear, that's fine then....I'll see you at six....'bye..." The person nearest him had clearly overheard the end of the conversation and stared at him, saying "Buy??" Somebody else overheard that "Buy?" and in two seconds the room was full of people yelling "Buy! Buy!" Or indeed, "Baa! Baaa!"

OK, on that sheepish note, on to a couple of charts and first of all today we'll look at a "schematic" one of a countertrend channel - last weekend's "triangles" appear to have helped a few of you and I'm pleased about that. Over the next few weeks we'll look at a few more of these things in this way. (It's a channel after a prior uptrend - just stand on your head to see the downtrend version....) Then there's an update of the Derwent channel probe/retrace from WICS of May 24th - just to make the point that sometimes (often!) things can take a fair while to develop. Next we'll examine a smaller scale (but still valid) "down" channel on the MAN Group chart and finally there's an update of the FTSE100 (or is that a "downdate" perhaps?) from video clip 2498.

That's all for this weekend then - yes, I realise you won't be reading this till Monday, but these ramblings are produced at the weekend - Mondays are definitely classed as a "day off" for the Williams bunch! It's time now to do a spot of sunlounging with a small refreshment - after all, the nights are drawing in again and you gotta get the best of the sunshine while you can - so all the very best till next weekend as usual.

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'.