Below we provide our trading range charts for 20 major country indices around the world. For each chart, the blue shading represents the index's "normal trading range," which is between one standard deviation above and below the 50-day moving average (white line). The red shading represents between one and two standard deviations above the index's 50-day moving average, and vice versa for the green shading. In general, the red shading is an initial overbought level, and a move above the red zone is an extreme overbought reading that suggests a short-term pullback is in the cards.

Only Sweden and Malaysia are currently trading above the red zone into extreme overbought territory. Canada, Brazil, the UK, and Switzerland are trading within their red zones and are trending nicely higher, while the rest of the country indices are within their normal trading ranges. None of the countries are currently oversold, but some of them don't have attractive chart patterns. China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Spain are all struggling to stay above their 50-days at the moment and have a lot of work to do to return to long-term uptrends.

Last week, the BoE decided to leave rates unchanged at 0.5% and to forestall expanding on its GBP 200bn asset-purchase program, which was widely anticipated by the whole of economists in the Bloomberg consensus. It was hard to see any reason for the BoE to change the outlook for monetary policy in the short term, having decided to pause the program in February.

The latest economic data confirmed that the wait-and-see stance recently adopted by the BoE is appropriate. Over the last week, GDP growth in Q4 was revised upwards from 0.1% q/q to 0.3% q/q; the CIPS Manufacturing Index remained well above 50 in February (56.6, unchanged from January); and the CIPS Services Index rose from 54.5 in January to 58.4 in February. However, these data confirmed that the UK economy is likely to grow at a moderate pace in the next few quarters and will not recover the pre-crisis growth trend for many years, as BoE’s Governor Mervyn King stressed in the press conference for the presentation of February’s Inflation report.

Investors are continuing to search for direction after two days of relatively flat trading.

Ahead of the opening bell, Dow Jones industrial average futures rose 10, or 0.1 percent, to 10,574. Standard & Poor's 500 index futures rose 1.20, or 0.1 percent, to 1,141.70, while Nasdaq 100 index futures rose 4.25, or 0.2 percent, to 1,905.50.