Crude price rallies
With oil, there’s always events to come to the rescue of investors…
Oil prices rose significantly this week as a result of geo-political developments. The renewed violence in the Middle East and the resurgence of political difficulties between the Ukraine and Russia over the gas pipleine and supplies caused the market to revive from the regular gloom.

Gold still might be the answer
While it’s noteworthy that gold has really made the predicted push on up over the last six months - perhaps the price was too high at the beginning of the crisis and there just wasn’t the room for any value.
But as of this week, gold has risen to a 3-month high, getting within reach of the benchmark US$900 an oz level at the beginning of the week - it didn’t quite keep up the strong progress and subsided 0.5% from this high, although was up 3.5 percent on the week.

There is some optimism around - equities kicked off January on a more positive note following the carnage of 2008. That’s not to say it’s all going to sorted out any time soon, simply that there can be bargains to be had…

By anybody’s reckoning, the response by central governments to the global crisis to revive demand has been brisk - it may be not be effective - but with phrases like New Deal now in the air, there is hope that in many sectors the actions taken will show some positive results.

If past experience is anything to go by, all the structural defects have yet to be identified and so there will be the odd surprise and setback lurking to be brought to light in 2009.

The ASI by Welles Wilder - yet another market indicator, he was certainly busy - is used  to gauge the long-term trend by comparison of open, close, high and low prices. It’s another oscillator, -100 through 0 to 100.

ASI positive = long-term trend will be higher,
ASI negative = long-term trend will be lower.

Clearly, the ASI is of most use in the trading of futures, but it is possible to use it in the analysis of other instruments. Also used together with price movment charts in the confirmation of trendline breakouts, - in that the identical trend line will be crossed in either situation.