HEXUS.sharewatch: tech rally led by AMD

Following some fairly hefty falls in the past couple of weeks, tech stocks had somewhat of a rally last week as markets all showed decent gains.

Macroeconomic factors may well have played a part, with the US doubling its commitment to bailing out key companies and the UK continuing to experiment with ways to encourage consumers to spend more money they don't have.

However a few tech companies have significantly out-performed the market, led by the biggest loser of the previous two weeks: AMD. There doesn't seem to have been any specific news concerning AMD to make its shares increase by nearly 27 percent, so we must assume investors thought they'd undervalued the stock and started buying.

Other gainers included beleaguered Yahoo!, which saw board member and major shareholder Carl Icahn further increase his stake in the company, and Google, which may have encouraged investors with talk of cutting staffing costs.

In this crazy, unpredictable economic climate, HP Microsoft and Apple were the only losers last week. Apple may have suffered from once more being told off for misleading advertisements, but other than that there's no clear culpability on the part of any of these tech giants.

The figures below were taken at around 9:30 this morning and so represent prices at close of business on Friday except for the FTSE 100, which was down over one percent in early trading today.