It will probably mean nothing in the longer term, but the US and UK stock markets had a pretty optimistic start to the year on the only day of trading so far in 2009.
The FTSE 100 went up by 2.9 percent on 2nd January, apparently its best ever start to the year, while the NASDAQ jumped 3.5 percent and the Dow rose by nearly three percent to top 9,000 for the first time in a couple of months.
As you can see from our table, this was the culmination of a week of post-Christmas optimism that saw pretty healthy rises across the board. It's not clear where this light-heartedness is coming from, but maybe investors think share prices are bottoming out.
All our list ended up for the week, and last week's biggest faller led the field with a pretty spectacular rebound. Half of NVIDIA's 16 percent rebound was achieved last Friday, while rival AMD saw its shares jump by ten percent on the same day.
Again there are no conspicuous reasons for these jumps, other than the overall upward trend, but maybe they're getting a bit of pre-CES buzz.
| Company | Listing | Share price 15/12/08 | Share price 22/12/08 | Share price 29/12/08 | Share price 5/1/09 | 7-day change | Market cap (bn) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD | AMD | 2.28 | 2.27 | 2.18 | 2.38 | 9.2% | 1.45 |
| Apple | AAPL | 98.27 | 90.00 | 85.81 | 90.75 | 5.8% | 80.67 |
| Avnet | AVT | 16.20 | 17.14 | 17.38 | 18.98 | 9.2% | 2.86 |
| Dell | DELL | 11.48 | 11.09 | 10.65 | 10.75 | 0.9% | 20.90 |
| GOOG | 315.76 | 310.17 | 300.36 | 321.32 | 7.0% | 101.14 | |
| HP | HPQ | 35.97 | 35.40 | 34.97 | 36.81 | 5.3% | 88.94 |
| IBM | IBM | 82.20 | 83.52 | 81.33 | 87.37 | 7.4% | 117.38 |
| Ingram Micro | IM | 11.81 | 13.25 | 12.97 | 13.98 | 7.8% | 2.30 |
| Intel | INTC | 14.75 | 14.44 | 14.18 | 15.20 | 7.2% | 84.54 |
| Microsoft | MSFT | 19.36 | 19.12 | 19.13 | 20.33 | 6.3% | 180.85 |
| Nvidia | NVDA | 8.60 | 8.52 | 7.51 | 8.71 | 16.0% | 4.68 |
| Tech Data | TECD | 16.66 | 18.02 | 17.00 | 18.80 | 10.6% | 0.94 |
| Yahoo | YHOO | 13.15 | 13.03 | 12.34 | 12.85 | 4.1% | 17.81 |
| Dow | .DJI | 8629.68 | 8579.11 | 8515.55 | 9034.69 | 6.1% | N/A |
| FTSE 100 | .FTSE | 4280.35 | 4286.93 | 4216.59 | 4561.79 | 8.2% | N/A |
| NASDAQ | .IXIC | 1540.72 | 1564.32 | 1530.24 | 1632.21 | 6.7% | N/A |
