My evidence? A 60-second conversation with a financially illiterate acquaintance.

Still, the dialogue was so surreal I thought it worth reporting.

Clueless acquaintance:

You invest in the stock market, right?

Monkey: No, I trade rather than invest.

Clueless acquaintance:

What's the difference?

Monkey: My outlook is shortterm, anything from days to weeks.

Clueless acquaintance: So you're a gambler! God, you're a gas man.

Monkey: I'm not a gambler, I use technical analysis and . . .

Clueless acquaintance:

Anyway, I thought it time I raid the piggy bank and invest it properly. I hear that stock markets the world over are making all-time highs.

He's not the only one. All this guff about Dow 12,000 has the financial cheerleaders egging on Joe and Josephine Soap to 'invest' their hardearned-money. Sentiment surveys carried out by the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). . . a pretty thick bunch, to be honest . . . show that bulls heavily outnumber their bearish counterparts.

Of course, the same guys were tripping over themselves just a few months ago in a desperate rush to cash in their pension funds because the market was dropping like a stone (that's when you should have been buying, people).

Anyway, the little guys got their first dose of market medicine in quite a while last Wednesday, with the Nasdaq taking a 2% bruising after data indicated that the economy might be slowing more than anticipated.

With price coming into its 20-day moving average and the nice round figure of 1700 (round numbers can act as support in the short term), I decided to take a position just before the closing bell. For now, I'm not too concerned about the data . . . participants were just looking for a reason to take some money off the table after a hell of a run the last few months.

I'm also expecting that Friday's jobs data will be robust, easing the above-mentioned fears and hopefully resulting in another push towards year highs. By the time you read this, the market will have given its verdict on the data.

I'm a bit iffy about this trade, despite having fundamental and technical reasons for entry. For one thing, I hate having to catch a falling knife, which is what I did on Wednesday. Secondly, semiconductor stocks, a group that should lead technology bull markets, have been lagging in recent weeks.

Still, I'd been waiting for a pull-back. I got it. My stop is around the 1670 area, giving a max loss of 600.

Wednesday was a busy day in general. I bought into oil at $59. This is very much a counter-trend trade, something I rarely indulge in, and I'm taking a smaller position as a result (stop is under the recent year low at $57, max loss is 400).

It's a slightly risky set-up but a couple of technical indicators suggest to me that price may be bottoming. I won't bore you with the details, but try impressing your friends with a casual reference to the recent bullish hammer-like candlestick as well as bullish RSI divergence with each lower low in October (yes, I am a bore).

The same day saw me short my good friends at Yahoo! This was a lovely setup. I wrote last week that I would look to go short around $25.50 but the stock showed real strength and surged past this figure, heading all the way to $26.70.

It's very risky to stand in the way of momentum, so I elected to stand aside and short on a break of the prior day's low ($26.10).

What's so good about the set-up? The stock's 50-day moving average is just ahead (as is another resistance area . . . I won't describe it, as I don't think my editor would allow any more technical porn in the one column). The stock is also very overbought and I shorted just as the momentum looks set to swing back towards the bigger picture down-trend.

Will it work out? Don't know. I never do, which is why my stop is at the $26.80 area. It's a good set-up though, and that's my job, to take the good set-ups, reject the poor ones and hope that the money will follow.

I'm still holding onto IBM.

It has gone nowhere this week, but there's no hint of a downturn either.

No Elan trades this week, but the outlook is decidedly bearish and I'm looking to get short. The stock has fallen out of a two-month-long trading range, as well as piercing its 200-day moving average for the first time in a year (excluding a very brief dip below it in July). That's not good.

I would love to see price crawl up to the $15.20 level, where there is strong resistance. It may not make it though . . . Elan's chart is looking very ugly. I would not like to be long on the stock at the moment.

I know that many Irish people trade Elan. That's obvious from online message boards, where the desperate and the doomed sling insults at each other in misguided outpourings of love or hatred towards their stocks. For heaven's sake, it's a stock, not a puppy.

Why give a damn? A trader's loyalty should be to his pockets. Speaking of pockets, mine should be weighed down or emptied in the coming days. Fingers crossed.

Weekly gain/loss: - 200 Overall balance: 29,400