After taking a bruising towards the end of the previous week, the Nasdaq 100 came into its 50-day moving average at 1785 and Monkey enthusiastically jumped in.

The market's reaction was more muted and by Tuesday it had fallen to 1770 (my stop was below 1760).

Thankfully, the bulls came out on Wednesday after good earnings reports from Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems. By close of day, it had pierced the 1800 level and is looking good for further upside.

As for my existing positions, Elan continues to look iffy (good for me - I'm short). The stock hit a low of $12.17 before recovering somewhat. I'm not complaining. In one of my earliest columns, I mentioned that Elan is a very good stock to trade. Some stocks chop you up, but Elan tends to trend nicely and predictably.

If I was trying to explain the bene"ts of technical analysis to someone, I'd use Elan as a textbook example. September and October saw it in a tight trading range, where 'buy low, sell high' was the order of the day. Once it dropped out of that range, going short was the obvious move and the stock has been in a nice orderly down-trend since then, with each bounce being met by eager sellers.

If you want to see what I'm on about, just go into stockcharts. com, type ELN into the symbol box and take a look at a six-month candlestick chart with Elan's 50and 200-day moving averages included. Go on, do it now - it's not rocket science, despite the jargon, and will be a lesson to any curious newbies out there.

I said goodbye to what remained of my position in CRH. Once the stock dipped below Euro30, I was out.

Unfortunately for Monkey, it immediately turned around and has gone back up to Euro31. Am I annoyed?

Yes. Second thoughts? No. The novice trader says 'I shouldn't have sold' and resolves to hang tough next time, when the market promptly puts his head on a platter.

Sure, it's frustrating for this to happen but more often than not, using stops saves my bacon. The alternative is to hang on and hope, which is a loser's game.

I was stopped out of my remaining position in Apple at the end of the previous week. A negative reaction to Apple's cautious earnings outlook saw the stock open below $92.50, triggering my stop in the process. Good job too - within three days, Apple had lost another $7.

Anyway, Monday saw Apple dive down to its 50-day moving average at $87.50. Considering that the stock had already dropped $10 over the previous week, giving up all all of its post-iPhone announcement gains in the process, it looked good for a bounce, at least to me.

I bought in only to see it dip another $2 before stabilising.

Tuesday saw some early gains but the stock could not get past $87.50 - old support, new resistance, as technical analysts like to say - and a late-day dive saw it head back down to the $85.50 level. Euch.

More of the same on Wednesday, with some early gains counteracted by late selling. I decided to take a small(ish) loss of Euro300 or so and sell at $86.60. Usually, I would hold on and give the stock more of a chance, but Apple's failure to move on a day of signi"cant Nasdaq strength made me jittery.

Everything else seemed to be moving on Wednesday and I'm suspecting that Apple may not yet be over its recent bout of weakness.

As a result, I'm looking to get short if the stock dips below $85. There's obvious chart support at that juncture, so a failure to observe it would be a good signal to get short.

By the same token, Apple remains in an up-trend and a jump above the 50-day average at $87.50 would negate the above set-up. In other words, Monkey's likely to go short on a dip below $85 or long on a bounce above $87.50.

I know that some readers, especially the 'investors' (what a dirty word) among you, will be puzzled by such promiscuity but I'm nothing if not "exible. As a trader once put it, "If the market's going down, then I'm Señor Short. If it's going up, then I'm Larry Long".

That's a bit simplistic - traders who buy every new high and short every new low aren't going to last long - but it gets across the basic point I'm trying to make. Like I've said before, this is just a game and it's not a game that the opinionated are likely to win.

Many traders are making and losing spondulicks aplenty with the recent big swings in the price of oil.

The bottom "shers got lucky this week after the price rose by a whopping 5% on Tuesday following reports that President Dubya would propose doubling the capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to 1.5 billion barrels. That was the biggest one-day increase since last September, but the intermediateterm trend is still down. Were it to rise a little more, I'll likely go short.

I'm also spying a short position in Research in Motion (they're the guys who make the Blackberry). This stock has been on a roll - doubling over the last six months - but price action has turned negative since Apple's iPhone announcement. I'm hoping to see a weak rise to $130$135, where I'll likely go short.

It should be a busy week this week. Hopefully, it'll be a good one too.

Weekly gain/loss: -Euro100 Overall balance: Euro39,000