FTSE for Friday: a new rule and a new forecast for FTSE 100
As the blue-chip index has a pause for breath after a record-breaking run, independent analyst Alistair Strang reveals what his bespoke software says about the market's potential.
23rd January 2026 07:53
by Alistair Strang from Trends and Targets
FTSE 100 index movements since the start of 2026 brought a new rule for us to observe, something which makes little sense yet proved to be exquisitely correct. As always, our reasoning can verge on the absurd but one of our “things” has been a reliable argument which relates to glass ceilings.
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We’ve now got a rule which argues accurately on the drop potentials when a glass ceiling is exceeded and a new high achieved. To most folk, this isn’t a big deal, but for us our rule book just expanded from 189 to 190 concepts of what may happen following a price movement. Our software is emphatically not AI, just a series of “if” statements designed to avoid logic loops occurring and sometimes toss out correct answers.
Currently, below 10,134 points indicates the potential of weakness to an initial 10,083 points with our secondary, if broken, at 10,046 points. If triggered, the tightest stop loss level looks like a fairly acceptable 10,170 points. Oddly, we suspect this game plan will probably fail as it’s almost too obvious.
Instead, above 10,196 should become of special interest, giving an initial target level at 10,283 points with our secondary, if beaten, at 10,360 points.
Have a good weekend, we’re going to sit back and hope the FTSE 100 experiences some gains.
Source: Trends and Targets. Past performance is not a guide to future performance.
Alistair Strang has led high-profile and "top secret" software projects since the late 1970s and won the original John Logie Baird Award for inventors and innovators. After the financial crash, he wanted to know "how it worked" with a view to mimicking existing trading formulas and predicting what was coming next. His results speak for themselves as he continually refines the methodology.
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