Forecaster in search of a wave

LET'S hope the ex-Merrilly Lynching financial forecaster Robert Prechter has lost his knack for calling the

market.

His newsletter, the Elliott Wave Theorist, has ominously predicted the Dow Jones Industrial Average "is just a few points away from attaining our ideal target".

"Given the extent of the rise, there is no longer much reason to allow for a more complex corrective pattern to unfold," says Prechter, who is one of the best-known practitioners of the form of the technical analysis developed in the Great Depression by the bean counter Ralph Elliott.

On a positive note Prechter, based in Gainesville, Georgia, reckons the market still might "go to a higher level on a normal retracement range".

Aside from that, "when the market rolls over", we are apparently going to see "the strongest downward wave".

On a wing and a Lowy

The top gun of the property sector, Westfield's David "Maverick" Lowy, is preparing the wheel-chocks for what is expected to be the biggest flying weekend yet at the Temora Aviation Museum he set up in 1999.

The buzz around the Riverina town is over which plane Lowy could pilot and whether his fellow Crown director, James "Ice Man" Packer, could be his wingman.

"On the day they will announce who's flying what," said a spokeswoman for Lowy, who said it was still being worked out what jet the Westfield deputy chairman might pilot.

The air force will be sending two F-18 Hornets for the Father's Day weekend event.

The museum will show off the Australian-built 52-year-old RAAF Sabre fighter jet it has just spent three years restoring.

Fortunately for Westfield shareholders, there are apparently only two pilots in Australia qualified to fly the Sabre and Lowy is not one of them.

The museum also has Australia's two remaining airworthy Spitfires, a Tigermoth, a Meteor fighter, a Vampire and a Cessna A37B Dragonfly previously flown by Lowy.

Having a 2040-metre second runway, Temora arguably has the best airport infrastructure of any small town in NSW.

Savage approach

Leighton Holdings appears to have a novel approach to settling its workplace disputes in the Middle East. The head of Leighton's part-owned Al Habtoor venture, David Savage, this week offered the olive branch to 2000 construction workers who walked off the job in Dubai.

He told ArabianBusiness.com that he managed to get workers to return to work after offering them a sweet deal they could not refuse.

"The company earns value based on its output, so if a worker, including one of the labourers, is productive, then we are happy to share the proportion of revenue," he reasoned, after the local police reportedly moved in to arrest some of the protesting workers.

Workers told the local media they were paid between 500 dirhams ($164) and 700 dirhams ($229) a month. On this basis, it could take a Dubai construction worker 585 years to make the $1.14 million bonus Savage earned in the 2008 financial year.

Comic twist for JJ

Goldman Sachs director Jim Johnson appears to be on a stand-up comedy tour of Australia. "I'm not in favour of over-regulating compensation," he told The Australian newspaper. Mr Johnson, who once ran the imploded investment bank, Lehman Brothers, and Fannie Mae, which was bailed out by taxpayers, said: "I'm not seeking to be controversial but this is a big topic and there has been a lot of focus on this in the US, Europe and Australia." Maybe he is just seeking to be well paid.

Drinks will come later

The debt-laden winemaker Australian Vintage (aka McGuigan Wines) might have to delay the sale of its Loxton winery a little longer.

The Indian winemaker Indage, which last year never got around to paying the $60 million for the Deathstar-looking winery, appears to be having some issues on the home front. According to the Indian financial website livemint.com, at least 250 employees at Indage Vintners have resigned in the past fortnight after the company, according to an unnamed source, had "failed to pay them salaries since at least November 2008".

Another company source told the website that Indage had paid 40 per cent of the unpaid wages on August 31. I have deposited the cheque but will come to know whether the cheque will be honoured or not in a day or two," one happy former employee told the website.

The group's Australian Thachi winery in South Australia's Riverland, meanwhile, is quietly distancing itself from the Indian operations of its parent company. "We have nothing to do with India itself," Thachi's operations manager Tim Pearce assured CBD.

He said Thachi was owned by the company listed by Indage in Britain. Mr Pearce said his staff were still getting paid and everything was OK "at this stage".

The odd literacy issue

Goldman Sachs JBWere's institutional dealing desk, meanwhile, appears to have encountered some literacy problems.

In its afternoon note to clients yesterday, it warned that "finically literate" journalists could soon pressure the Federal Government to roll back its stimulus package and notes that it is "not necessary anymor".

Clarifying the note to CBD, the shark-watching institutional trader, Richard Coppleson,said the Government just needed to cut its proposed stimulus.

"The obvious thing is that if the RBA thinks they cannot wait until March next year to increase rates and instead hike in the next two months, then the Government must listen to what the RBA are [sic] saying to them," he said.

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