FTSE for Friday: will November end with a whimper?
With Americans still recovering from Thanksgiving excesses, there's a good chance of a quiet end to the week, but you never know. Independent analyst Alistair Strang gives his assessment of blue-chip potential.
29th November 2024 07:14
by Alistair Strang from Trends and Targets
We dread “Black Friday” for the quite absurd reason is nothing usually happens on the FTSE 100. The problem obviously emanates from the USA and their notion of closing on Thursday for Thanksgiving, opening the markets on Friday morning, then closing at lunchtime to allow everyone to go shopping.
It creates a situation where Europe traditionally does very little, and we anticipate a worse echo than experienced on Thursday for the FTSE, where the market managed a trading width of just 30 points. In fact, from 11.20 until the market closed, the FTSE 100 managed just 18 points of useless up/down games.
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In short, we expect the blue-chip index to do very little on Friday. One advantage from the very flat day on the markets for Thursday was it gave a pretty thorough clue of what to watch for, if the start of December intends the month being hopeful.
The immediate situation suggests above 8,305 points should trigger FTSE gains, though we’d warn, as always, not to trust any upward spike above such a level at the opening seconds of trade. Certainly, we’re obviously within days of the time for the legendary Santa Rally to begin, so we should have signals fairly soon.
Currently, above 8,305 points [caveat: not with an opening second spike] allows for market movement to an initial 8,388 points and a fairly strong chance for some hesitation, due to the proximity of the immediate Blue downtrend. Our longer-term secondary is quite impressive at an amazing 8,600 points. The tightest stop is very useful at 8,260 points.
Should things intend go wrong, below 8,260 risks promoting reversal down to an initial 8,239 points with our secondary, if broken, calculating at 8,204 points.
Have a good weekend.
Source: Trends and Targets. Past performance is not a guide to future performance.
Alistair Strang has led high-profile and "top secret" software projects since the late 1970s and won the original John Logie Baird Award for inventors and innovators. After the financial crash, he wanted to know "how it worked" with a view to mimicking existing trading formulas and predicting what was coming next. His results speak for themselves as he continually refines the methodology.
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