{"id":42,"date":"2008-08-18T14:50:50","date_gmt":"2008-08-18T13:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/blog\/?p=42"},"modified":"2008-08-18T14:50:50","modified_gmt":"2008-08-18T13:50:50","slug":"the-most-common-question-of-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/2008\/08\/18\/the-most-common-question-of-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"The most common question of 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have a look at this &#8220;mystery&#8221; chart and tell me what you think?<\/p>\n<p>Does anyone think this (whatever it is) is going down any time soon?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/mystery-chart.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-43\" src=\"http:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/mystery-chart.jpg\" alt=\"Mystery Chart! \" width=\"500\" height=\"307\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Hopefully we&#8217;re all thinking the same thing: That it looks very much like something that&#8217;s got a bright future, something that&#8217;s going up in the world. There doesn&#8217;t seem to be too much evidence that it is topping out, would you agree? In fact if this was a stock and you owned it you&#8217;d probably be more than happy to hold onto it, yes? And if you felt the market was going to head lower and you wanted to find a short trade to put on you probably wouldn&#8217;t chose something as strong as this, agreed?<\/p>\n<p>It was Charles Dow almost 100 years ago who suggested we can <strong>define an uptrend as a series of higher highs and higher lows<\/strong>. In contrast a <strong>downtrend is defined as lower highs and lower lows<\/strong>, which brings me on to the next chart.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/rbos0808.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-44\" src=\"http:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/rbos0808.jpg\" alt=\"RBOS October 2006 - August 2008\" width=\"500\" height=\"335\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As you can see this is a chart for Royal Bank of Scotland between October 2006 and the present (August 2008 in case you&#8217;re reading this in retrospect). Now I&#8217;d like to point out straight away that I could have chosen any number of bank stocks from any number of countries for the purpose of posting this blog. I used RBOS because I&#8217;ve got a couple of mates who work there and I&#8217;ve got a sadistic streak. Sorry fellas.<\/p>\n<p>Because I think it&#8217;s fair to say this chart is quite a bit different to our first chart, wouldn&#8217;t you say?<\/p>\n<p>Well the eagle eyed amongst you may actually have noticed that it is actually <strong>THE SAME CHART<\/strong>, but &#8220;flipped&#8221;. We have effectively put a mirror below the real chart to create our &#8220;mystery chart&#8221;. So the mystery chart is RBOS with 7 quid at the bottom and \u00a31.50 at the top.<\/p>\n<p>Now think about the paragraph above, and think about your reactions when you read it. I would imagine it was something like this:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;&#8230; it looks very much like something that&#8217;s got a bright future <em>(I agree!)<\/em>, something that&#8217;s going up in the world <em>(yes indeed)<\/em>. There doesn&#8217;t seem to be too much evidence that it is topping out <em>(too right, it&#8217;s a stonker!)<\/em> , would you agree? <em>(yes)<\/em> In fact if this was a stock and you owned it you&#8217;d probably be more than happy to hold onto it, yes? <em>(yes please, love it!!)<\/em>.  And if you felt the market was going to head lower and you wanted to find a short trade to put on you probably wouldn&#8217;t chose something as strong as this, agreed?  <em>(agreed, let&#8217;s short something else, surely).<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Which brings us to the title of this Blog: &#8220;The most common question of 2008&#8221;. Which is, of course &#8220;Should I buy Bank Stocks?&#8221;. I reckon you just answered your own question!!<\/p>\n<p><strong>NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If you want to gamble go to a casino. If you want to play the stock market or make money spread betting follow some simple rules and don&#8217;t just put on stupid high risk trades. I&#8217;m sick of being asked this question. It&#8217;s a joke. <strong>It&#8217;s simple: Don&#8217;t buy things that are still going down. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Let the pros tell you when to buy, ie let the market tell you when enough professional buying has happened in a Stock that it is now in an uptrend. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If you &#8220;flip&#8221; the chart and there&#8217;s no way in the world you would SELL our mystery chart, then <strong>what the heck are you doing even  thinking about BUYING it when we put it the right way round? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The point I&#8217;m making isn&#8217;t that Bank stocks <em>haven&#8217;t<\/em> bottomed out. They might have done, but there isn&#8217;t enough weight of evidence yet. It&#8217;s a dangerous trade, and there&#8217;s no need to rush in. These stocks could go sideways for years now, or even keep heading lower, after all we haven&#8217;t broken our series of lower highs and lower lows yet, have we?!<\/p>\n<p>Can I finish by saying that we have the chappies at Updata to thank for making &#8220;flip&#8221; a standard part of many charting systems these days. I&#8217;m pretty certain it wasn&#8217;t until they started to expound exactly what I&#8217;ve done above.<\/p>\n<p>Cheers,<\/p>\n<p>Clive.<\/p>\n<p>PS. August is turning out to be a bit of a damp squib in Equity markets so far, and the best advice I can give is to suggest you don&#8217;t get too carried away if you&#8217;re trading Equity Indices like the Dow and the FTSE. The market has a habit of taking money off of you in quiet periods. There could be some really solid trends to trade between now and the end of the year. Don&#8217;t take yourself out of the game trading during low volume quiet periods like now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have a look at this &#8220;mystery&#8221; chart and tell me what you think?<br \/>\nDoes anyone think this (whatever it is) is going down any time soon?<\/p>\n<p>Hopefully we&#8217;re all thinking the same thing: That it looks very much like something that&#8217;s got a bright future, something that&#8217;s going up in the world. There doesn&#8217;t seem to be too much &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn-primary entries-readmore\" href=\"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/2008\/08\/18\/the-most-common-question-of-2008\/\" title=\"Read more\">Read more<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[23,67,98,107,112,156,158,195,207,236,379,436,437,445,464,674,519,544,550],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-bank-stocks","tag-buy-signals","tag-chart-analysis","tag-charting-banks","tag-clive-lambert","tag-dow-jones","tag-dow-theory","tag-footsie","tag-ftse","tag-futurestechs","tag-rbs","tag-spread-bet","tag-spread-bet-analysis","tag-spread-betting","tag-stock-tips","tag-technical-analysis","tag-trading-analysis","tag-trading-tips","tag-trend-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurestechs.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}