HEXUS.sharewatch: AMD and NVIDIA gain in turbulent market

The foul news from the financial sector has continued unabated in the past week, with the revelations of record corporate losses both here and today from AIB in the US. The extent to which bankers, who we had always assumed were safe custodians of the world's money, have arsed things up continues to beggar belief.

And of course the rest of us aren't just paying for it directly through the unprecedented tax payer bail-outs of these catastrophically mismanaged companies, but indirectly through a global recession that makes the bursting of the dotcom bubble seem like a barely audible pop.

Another form of collateral damage is the stock markets. Every new billion lost by a bank depresses stock markets further, often dragging entirely unrelated shares down with it. Today we're seeing new 11-year lows for the Dow and the FTSE is pretty close to a 12-year low.

Last week, however, there were further signs that stocks are being assessed on their own merits, semiconductor companies AMD and NVIDIA both posted healthy gains in a turbulent market. Neither had especially earth-shattering news last week; NVIDIA appointed a couple of new execs and AMD was talking about its new server processor, but investors warmed to them nonetheless.

The big loser of the week was Microsoft, possibly due to the increasing pressure it's facing over the bundling of its Internet Explorer web browser with Windows.