#FTSE #DOW Finally, the stars aligned and brought a Grand Prix where there a few utterly fantastic laps, along with some reasonable attempts at cheating from the reigning world champion. Surely, at some point, the guy is going to have to admit he’s never going to challenge Louis Hamiltons 8 honest World Championships. Unfortunately, we’ve discovered a new way of avoiding watching Formula1 on a Sunday afternoon, giving plenty of reason to spend time in the garden with plausible deniability for any complaints from my wife.
Over the last 3 months, we’ve knocked together some seriously successful batches of wine. Our number #1 has turned out to be a Rioja, produced from grape concentrate from France. Our #2, amazingly, is a Pinot Grigio. This 25 litre batch has proven wonderful, perfectly capable of converting red wine folk into the usually bland world of white wine. And our #3 success story was another batch we called Klingon Blood Wine (actually a Cabernet Sauvignon) which has turned out to be rather nice, equally fine with morning cornflakes or with late night snacks!
The “secret” to the improvement in our wine efforts is regarded as being due to 2 things. Firstly, we’ve only been using spring water, obtained and licensed locally. And secondly, we’re now paranoid about fermentation temperatures, ideally aiming to hold things at 24c during the fermentation process. However, we think we can do better, so Sunday afternoon was spent distilling water on a home made pressure system. This involved boiling water, letting the steam escape from the pressure container and pass through a condenser coil (a spiral of copper tubes), this coil residing within a basin of seriously cold water. Our easy fix was to pour water from a garden hose into the basin, while occasionally tipping a load of ice cubes into the water. Any superheated steam passing through the condenser coil quickly changed into liquid, dripping into our 5 litre collection containers. Our theory is fairly basic, tap water in Argyll is very palatable but has produced some truly brilliant and truly awful wine fermentation runs. We’ve even got 30 bottles of a Shiraz which is foul, kept only in the hope it may mature! But since switching to Spring Water and being brutal with temperature control, quality has improved. But our theory is Distilled Water may produce the most stable run of imported grape concentrate, so our utterly tasteless water production during the Sunday Grand Prix will be used along with another batch of Rioja grape concentrate. Hopefully, the end product shall be a Rioja with serious depth of taste. We shall know this outcome in a few weeks.
In summary, if looking for a hobby which gives a perfect excuse to avoid watching a Grand Prix, getting into making real wine isn’t the worst idea and once you’ve made all the usual mistakes, it becomes fun, requiring a greater degree of patience than working with the stock markets. Our own production is now bottled, stored in a garden shed, and labelled with funny descriptions, giving a super way of saying thanks to folks and at the same time, gathering opinions on how good the experiment has been. From a personal perspective, it can be really funny, returning to the car after a dog walk and finding a bunch of empty wine bottles from other dog walker friends hoping for a refill. These dog owners are generally thanked by giving them cleaned and relabelled 2 Litre cola bottles which don’t need returned. This largess with wine isn’t a big deal, the final cost of each bottle often being just over £1. But the satisfaction of producing something considerably better than supermarket wine or petrol station plonk, is wonderful. Especially with our most recent Rioja which, after the feedback from 8 freebie bottles, is now maturing in the office wine rack, retained for our own in-house use on deserved occasions during the coming year.
Hopefully the distilled water fermentation run shall not be a disaster. Our preference is to avoid adding “ates” to our fermentation mixes, trying to produce a product which is free of additives. As for why, with no intention of selling the production and generally not consuming it immediately (aside from our Klingon Blood Wine), it’s a fun hobby, giving this writer the chance of indulging his experiments. Let’s just say manufacturing the kit to produce distilled water was not straightforward, the method to force condensation of superheated steam verges on being ‘a little’ dangerous. But on the bright side, it repurposed the use of an old big blue Calor Gas bottle, along with learning how weld properly. And better still, avoiding creating a seriously explosive situation.
My wife is quite happy with this sort of hobby thing, previously having tolerated my motorcycle phase, my sports car phase, my (still missed) big boats phase, my skiing phase, while always remaining in tolerant terror of my “I’ve got an idea!” mindset. Making wine seems to be socially acceptable, for most folk consuming little time once an initial production kit is obtained, fairly cheaply from Amazon or Ebay.
And this brings us to Barclays, a share price needing lots and lots of patience as it’s refusing to move with any strength. When we previously reviewed Barclays, we’d privately calculated the share price closing above 333p as being important. Arrogantly, we failed to mention this trigger level as closure above 316p should have been inevitable. When it closed on May 13th, this trigger level was engaged and the price – utterly uselessly – surged to 331p and has done very little since, it being hard to ignore the price remained below our private 333p trigger level. This was a big deal, something we should have mentioned but retained as a “secret”, thinking it would simply confirm our logic. Unfortunately, since May 13th the share price has carefully remained below our 333p level, almost as if the market itself knows a nudge above such a point should drive the share price a little crazy. From our perspective, this is probably quite a big deal, the market essentially confirming where our important trigger levels are.
Share price closure above 333p now calculates with an expectation of movement to an initial 352p with our secondary, if beaten, a longer term 394p. This is a really big deal, dumping the share price into a zone where a long term 600p has become viable.
If things intend go horribly wrong, the share price needs close below 311p as reversal to an eventual “bottom” of 200p is expected.
FUTURES
| Time Issued | Market | Price At Issue | Short Entry | Fast Exit | Slow Exit | Stop | Long Entry | Fast Exit | Slow Exit | Stop |
| 10:07:40PM | BRENT | 6261.9 | 6195 | 6092 | 5063 | 6550 | 6405 | 6471 | 6560 | 6309 |
| 10:24:55PM | GOLD | 3288.86 | 3291 | |||||||
| 10:35:10PM | FTSE | 8787 | 8757 | |||||||
| 10:36:20PM | STOX50 | 5364.5 | 5356 | |||||||
| 10:39:17PM | GERMANY | 24024 | 24079 | |||||||
| 10:44:51PM | US500 | 5903 | 5885 | |||||||
| 10:48:03PM | DOW | 42216 | 41817 | 41789 | 41479 | 42157 | 42382 | 42615 | 42882 | 42164 |
| 10:51:47PM | NASDAQ | 21322 | 21289 | |||||||
| 10:56:44PM | JAPAN | 37662 | 37651 |
30/05/2025 FTSE Closed at 8772 points. Change of 0.64%. Total value traded through LSE was: £ 11,598,431,042 a change of 144.4%
29/05/2025 FTSE Closed at 8716 points. Change of -0.11%. Total value traded through LSE was: £ 4,745,696,803 a change of -0.05%
28/05/2025 FTSE Closed at 8726 points. Change of -0.59%. Total value traded through LSE was: £ 4,748,118,751 a change of -20.39%
27/05/2025 FTSE Closed at 8778 points. Change of 0.7%. Total value traded through LSE was: £ 5,964,362,693 a change of -17.68%
23/05/2025 FTSE Closed at 8717 points. Change of -0.25%. Total value traded through LSE was: £ 7,245,191,684 a change of 42.4%
22/05/2025 FTSE Closed at 8739 points. Change of -0.53%. Total value traded through LSE was: £ 5,088,072,082 a change of 2.41%
21/05/2025 FTSE Closed at 8786 points. Change of -100%. Total value traded through LSE was: £ 4,968,302,608 a change of 0% 
SUCCESS above means both FAST & SLOW targets were met. ‘CESS means just the FAST target met and probably the next time it is exceeded, movement to the SLOW target shall commence.
Our commentary is in two sections. Immediately below are today’s updated comments. If our commentary remains valid, the share can be found in the bottom section which has a RED heading. Hopefully, this will mean you no longer need to flip back through previous reports. HYPERLINKS DISABLED IN THIS VERSION
Please remember, all prices are mid-price (halfway between the Buy and Sell). When we refer to a price CLOSING above a specific level, we are viewing the point where we can regard a trend as changing. Otherwise, we are simply speculating on near term trading targets. Our website is www.trendsandtargets.com.
UPDATE. We often give an initial and a secondary price. If the initial is exceeded, we still expect it to fall back but the next time the initial is bettered, the price should continue to the secondary. The converse it true with price drops.
We can be contacted at info@trendsandtargets.com. Spam filters set to maximum so only legit emails get through…
Section One – Outlook Updated Today. Click here for Section Two – Outlook Remains Valid shares
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Updated charts published on :