I’ve heard some pretty prominent market commentators say some really dismissive and stupid things about Technical Analysis. Saying you can’t use a price chart to predict what’s going to happen to a price. Well you can, as I frequently demonstrate in these posts, and the fact that they don’t believe it is to our advantage.…
Last week I was at an event held by the FT where the guest speaker was Paul Johnson from the Institute of Fiscal Studies. He’s basically your go-to guy for government spending and was talking about the Autumn Statement. It seems we’ve got some bumps ahead, particularly in terms of pension expenditure. The UK spends…
It’s an ill wind that makes you think “perhaps I should get solar before the government tariff ends”. Actually the tariff isn’t the main consideration, unless you’re likely to export 100% of your generated electricity (and perhaps not even then). It’s having a system where you need the power you generate that nets you more…
There were stories some time ago about people being duped into so-called early release of funds from their pensions. The problem with that is the fees were exorbitant and there was somewhere between a contingency and a certainty that the tax relief given to the contributions would be demanded back by the revenue at some…
I’m building a themed watchlist based on information from the Met Office that the next two years will be the hottest on record. One thing we do know about warmer weather is it means more rain. I examined some areas we might want to look at for trading opportunities, and in the second piece on…
I often have a look at the FT to see what’s good for a story. I can’t help noticing today that the number of negative stories far outweighs the positive ones. Top of the list today is Rolls Royce plc (RR.). Now I’ve written a few times about the profit warnings they’ve issued over recent…
There’s a popular myth that you can’t read the right hand side of a chart. Of course there is no precognition, we know that from science, but it’s hardly a blank page! The first thing you know is that a trend is more likely to continue than change from one day to the next. That’s…
As usual, the unintended consequences of legislation demanded by politicians, who have no scientific background, to appease a public ignorant of most things, but certainly compartmentalised in their thinking, come back to bite the government on the arse. The snag is they’re biting everyone else harder, especially the supermarkets, who are in the midst of…
This is not a piece about how to interpret a fanfare, but a nice illustration of some of the articles I’ve written over the last few months coming together. I wrote a piece called “Breakouts are for Dummies” back in August. The basic point being that even a trained monkey can see and trade breakouts.…
My cousin works for EasyJet, and although he’s been in love with airlines since he was a kid, I don’t think that’s really the dream job. He wanted to be a pilot, but that didn’t work out and he went through various high end airlines which led to fate conspiring for him to end up…
