Not many of you will remember a fifty-year-old song by Tommy Steel beginning I never felt more like singing the blues. Well, Ive kept humming it for the last two weeks. Ever since the Footsie (news) wobbled backwards, in fact.

I mean there we were enjoying a constant improvement in stock prices, and then this threat of a double dip looms again. I still dont think it will come to that, but the story has changed a bit and we have to live with it.

I still dont feel like selling any shares on the chance that all stocks will fall some more. I tried that in September last year, and they all shot back up in price before I could buy em back. Another costly mistake.

I get the feeling that its all this uncertainty about banks which has spooked the market. These changes will take four or five years I believe, but the market, which always looks ahead, is reacting badly now.

I feel tempted to sell my bank shares. But I wont because I still feel that bankers have learnt a nasty lesson and will be more careful in future. I know they are still paying silly bonuses in some cases, but I wont subscribe to the fashionable theory that banks will go on making errors, because their proprietors are like that.

Bankers can learn lessons the same as anyone else in Crazyland. Ive decided not to make a lot of mistakes Ive made before and when youve lost money on your errors its not difficult to learn never to make them again.

The amount of money the banks still need to keep them supported is a big worry and when these figures are bandied around in the news, share shifters, both big and small, are prone to worry. But weve lived through this sort of thing before, gang. And we will do again. The overall lesson of history is that money is made on trading shares in the long run. Rock on.