Steady as she goes

This is an extremely tricky week for punting on the Index.

It is the Parliamentary Easter recess, so there is little publicity for any but a few of the main players. Iran is dominating the news and it’s hard to see how that is going to play over the next seven days. Pensions are playing badly for Brown but a safe sell has been pre-empted by a sharp price adjustment by Anthony Wells, who stuck him in at a price of 59.5/60.0 this morning.

In fact, IG’s prices look extremely well judged generally and we toyed with the idea of just passing altogether and going ‘no bet’. We certainly wouldn’t discourage such a cautious approach and we have in any case decided to trim this week’s stakes back down to three points. Even these are placed tentatively and with a couple of provisos.

Gordon Brown’s price has edged up to 59.8/60.3 since we first looked at it, which confirms our suspicion that Anthony may have over adjusted for all the doom and gloom, leaving an opportunity on the top end. We propose a two point stake but with the strong recommendation that it should be trimmed back if the price moves any higher.

Ming Campbell has been conspicuously absent from our radar, despite the opportunities offered by Iran. His price has moved up a couple of pips since this morning and now offers, we think, an opportunity on the sell side – one point at 76.7.

Apart from that, it’s steady as she goes. With Tony Blair, the smart play must be to wait and see how things go. The sellers took his price down 0.6 this afternoon to a tempting 65.1/65.6, but we’d give it a few days before taking a view, just in case Iran turns nastier.

John Reid looked a safe sell but here the sellers got in early and we can’t see there’s any value left at 73.8/74.3. We expect a bounce for David Cameroon. Last week’s price looked too low to be true. Unfortunately Anthony felt the same way and it’s hard to make a case now for a buy or a sell at the current prices. The rest looked distinctly uninspiring and it wouldn’t surprise us to find next week that a number of the results are bang on the spread.

Above are the numbers we used, with suggestions to the right. We will be commenting throughout the week, so watch out for further advice.

A spreadsheet showing Brand~Index price movements is available for download here.

Peter Smith (Peter the Punter)