The Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street piece on prospects for the IBM Corp share price bowled a few pretty nasty googlies, but the unkindest cut was to ask celebrated (mostly for the wrong reasons) veteran market pundit Joe Granville what he thought: in the strange language of that mysterious breed of rune-readers and astrologers, the chartists, he commented that IBM’s chart looked nice – you’ve got a beautiful pattern of rising bottoms (for the uninitiated, the charts of few share prices go straight up or straight down, they typically undulate, and what he meant was that of late, each succeeding low point on the chart has been higher than the previous one, which chartists regard as an encouraging sign) – adding it will come right back to $126 by summer – there isn’t any doubt about it, to which the Journal advises readers parenthetically that Never one to state a point timidly, Mr Granville uses ‘there isn’t any doubt’ the way other analysts use ‘I think’.
