yet another technical breakout today

VPE (Victoria Petroleum) closed well above its second set of double tops today - the May-June-July ones.

Where euphoric speculation and ramping are absent, a chart tends to represent the fundamentals. Clearly the market at last feels the fundamentals are favourable for VPE.

Today's breakout is on top of VPE closing above a first set of double tops (the July-Sep-Oct ones) yesterday, and the day before that breaking out of its one-year overhead trendline.

With today's high of .295 (CommSec) or .30 (ProfitSource) - depending on which data provider you believe - it's been quite a week for VPE.

So many technical breakouts in a single week are unusual.

On the sentiment/publicity front, there have been three market sensitive announcements re Tomcat this week - all of them positive - and there are further announcements to come on that and other drilling projects.

There was also Wednesday's Bulletin article, in which the influential Speculator column picked VPE as its recommended buy of the week. The Speculator usually gives his stocks a few 'shoves' through the year, so it's a fair bet that any good news in coming weeks will be amplified there.

All of the above breakouts were achieved on VPE's highest volume since 2004, and the second-highest (so far) of its 16-year history.

A week like this would normally presage further gains, as the stock is still cheap, and is still just above the latest double tops.