Hello and welcome to CantosCharts. My name is James Hughes, Senior Market Analyst at Alpari UK.

Today we're going to look into the equity markets and the Dow Jones in the US.

Now of course, this is one of the major indices in the world. When you get the uncertainty surrounding the markets and you get all the major stories that we've seen, the Dow, the FTSE, the S&P, those sorts of major indices do tend to get the big fluctuations and again, we've seen that sort of issue.

Now we've seen a lot of negativity coming from the US. We've seen warnings from the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke about raising the debt ceiling, about a potential of another round of quantitative easing - of course, we've had two, we're now looking at maybe the third round of that, talks of interest rates and also the issues we've got going on around the world, it's no surprise that really since the end of May, start of May or so, we've seen the market pretty much tail off because of those negative comments and because of where the economy seems to be going in the US.

Now this is an hourly chart and we are seeing a huge degree of negativity. Of course, we've started it at really the start of June, 1st June, falling all the way down and we've seen this trend line really gather some pace and be confirmed on the way down. We saw the second touch over here. The third touch is over there. We saw a slight break just recently maybe the last couple of days or so just towards the end of last week, but it doesn't really seem to have changed many peoples' opinions about where this market is going.

Now this is the overall trend line. What we do to take this in a little bit closer is we will just zoom the chart in a little bit. We've got the trend line running there and this takes us into that end of the chart that we were looking at there and again, you can see because of the uncertainty - and that's a word we've used so many times over the last couple of days or so, but we are seeing the markets really start to rattle around giving us quite good opportunities both on the upside and on the downside when these markets start to get moving and when the news starts to flow.

But, of course, you can see not only the trend line start to act as a bit of resistance on the upside, but there is a resistance level on the upside which is holding up and it is around that 12,000 level which is where the market has been really popping its head above, going below again and for a long time we had the same sort of issue on the FTSE 100 around that 6,000 level. 6,000, 6,100 started to act as that real area of resistance on the upside. It's 12,000 on the Dow which is acting as that area of resistance.

Now ever time we get there, we do get a pretty aggressive fall off of that area. Of course, we saw the Dow go to around 12,100 or so, touch that downtrend resistance and fall pretty heavily. Once it broke below that level, this 12,000, sort of 12,010 to be exact, but once we dropped below that, we've shown signs of pushing back up but never a sign of it really breaking through that upside level. We did see a brief break of the trend line resistance level, but where did it go to? Only that 12,000 mark. So 12,000 looks to be the real key area for the Dow going forward.

Okay, this isn't necessarily a long-term chart. It's only an hourly chart. We're only looking over the last few days or so, but still, this area is getting a lot of attention and of course you look to those big round numbers when you look for psychological resistance and support levels and 12,000, big round number, big psychological number for the Dow Jones as well.

One of those psychological thoughts becomes when the economy is doing so badly in the US, how should the Dow be above 12,000. I think that's a lot of what we're seeing from traders along this area.

Now of course the market has dropped down. We've got a brief area of support on the downside as well. We are seeing the market rally over the last few days or so. If we're going anywhere, it's going to be up to this resistance level on the trend line support. If it goes higher than that, of course we're only looking at 12,000 again, but with the market and the uncertainty that we're seeing throughout the US, the eurozone, all over the world, it's likely to see these markets chop and change around for quite a long time.

Thank you for listening. My name is James Hughes, Senior Market Analyst at Alpari. You can follow my market updates on Twitter at @jhughes00.