Pembroke: Careless underground leak blows Murdoch's cover

RUPERT MURDOCH really ought to ensure that guests at his London home are sworn to secrecy in future. A colleague travelling eastbound from Stamford Brook underground station recently found a photocopy of the central London pages of the A-Z with a big arrow pointing to the home of the News International chief and the full address printed underneath in prominent capitals. Could be a source of most unwelcome visitors.

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STOCK MARKET types trudging back to their desks after the break might like to know that historical forecasters envisage good things to come in 1994.

At least this is the market gospel according to David Schwartz, an enthusiastic American who runs the Burleigh Publishing company and beavers away at stock market data going back to 1919 just for laughs. 'January is going to go up, and historically the last week of the month is particularly good,' he says.

'I think the bull market has quite a way to go before it ends,' he continues but warns: 'No market has ever risen for more than nine consecutive quarters and we have had five already.'

ANYONE tired of reading the financial pages, investors' diaries or just plain guessing at what might happen to the markets this year might be forgiven for thinking that a new book called Trading Applications of Japanese Candlestick Charting, by Gary S Wagner and Bradley L Matheny, is a more interesting alternative. Not so.

The book is not about navigating the Far East by candlelight, though it might be a more interesting if it was. Instead, it concerns an arcane 17th century Japanese method of mastering the markets via a system of 'harmi line patterns', 'doji line candles' and 'dark cloud corners'.

It contains gems like this: 'On 2 August 1992 a long white opening bozu line showed the bulls were making a solid attempt to drive the price up. A long white marubozu candle followed, the single strongest bullish candle that formed with a white window (gap).'

Hard to see many traders wading through this lot, and at dollars 55 it is rather expensive even for the most over-bonused City trader. Not a 'buy' recommendation, I fear.

WE ALL KNOW that offices can be dangerous places. If it's not the wonky swivel chair suddenly causing you to backflip on to the floor, it is the photocopier from hell churning out 3,000 copies of a document when you've asked for one and none at all when you desperately need 50. But, according to a survey in the latest issue of Esquire magazine, the air conditioning is the biggest potential health hazard.

The worst case of air-ducts housing things they shouldn't was when Rentokil's ventilation division found four and a half dead cats in a water storage tank. And then there is the Sick Building Syndrome case at the BBC when the Beeb was fined after three people died and 90 were infected by an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in 1988.

So the advice for 1994 is: work from home, or buy a face mask.