The UK stock market, for all the woe in the news, seems to have broken out into new trading territory.

The question is, what went right?

Since a runaway dollar nearly broke everything, the buck has been reined in and up went all the stock markets. This is because however the rout brought on by a strong dollar was reversed it meant that in effect there was more money to stick into trades like buying equities.

Engineers will recognise oscillating systems, noise and signal running together. Theory suggests that the market is pure noise, but we all know that there is a faint signal in there and this is a product of economic growth, or you might say progress. The signal is too small to profit from in the short term and possibly only capturable by long-term holding rather than short-term trading.

The long-term holders often do very well indeed and will tell the short-term brigade to forget it as they will fail. Traders often fail. Those that spurn the believers...