The rally in share prices in our two US indices just about continued last week, although the FTSE 100 did drop a bit.
In most cases, any gains can be attributed to a surge on Thursday fuelled by a profit report from US bank Wells Fargo that was far better than expected. Any sign of life from the US banking sector is bound to fuel optimism and the Dow closed at its highest level since early February, breaking the psychologically important 8,000 barrier in the process.
The biggest gainers among our companies were once again AMD and NVIDIA, who managed to out gain their giant rival Intel despite the continuing hype surrounding the launch of its new server CPUs and a rebrand of its consumer offering. Both their shares are trading at their highest level since last autumn.
While AMD has been continuing to innovate with its Fusion Media Explorer and NVIDIA has shown its commitment to cutting costs by cutting some executive compensation, some of these continued gains might be attributable to OEM partners delivering new products based on their technology.
Low power, low price systems are what's hot in the PC market these days. HP has finally started producing its dv2 notebook - based on AMD's low power Congo platform - in large numbers, while Acer announced a mini-desktop utilising NVIDIA's ION graphics platform for Intel Atom CPUs. These reminders of continued innovation from the two companies surely won't have done their share prices any harm.
| Company | Listing | Share price 23/3/09 | Share price 30/3/09 | Share price 6/4/09 | Share price 13/4/09 | 7-day change | Market cap (bn) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD | AMD | 2.67 | 3.37 | 3.43 | 3.75 | 9.3% | 2.50 |
| Apple | AAPL | 101.59 | 106.85 | 115.99 | 119.57 | 3.1% | 106.48 |
| Avnet | AVT | 17.03 | 18.34 | 19.40 | 18.82 | -3.0% | 2.84 |
| Dell | DELL | 9.88 | 9.95 | 10.32 | 10.76 | 4.3% | 20.99 |
| GOOG | 330.16 | 347.70 | 369.78 | 372.50 | 0.7% | 117.60 | |
| HP | HPQ | 28.85 | 33.33 | 34.15 | 34.43 | 0.8% | 82.52 |
| IBM | IBM | 92.51 | 94.15 | 102.22 | 101.70 | -0.5% | 136.45 |
| Ingram Micro | IM | 11.57 | 13.19 | 13.44 | 13.22 | -1.6% | 2.14 |
| Intel | INTC | 14.65 | 15.42 | 15.95 | 15.98 | 0.2% | 89.24 |
| Microsoft | MSFT | 17.06 | 18.13 | 18.75 | 19.67 | 4.9% | 174.88 |
| Nvidia | NVDA | 9.53 | 10.46 | 11.32 | 12.04 | 6.4% | 6.53 |
| Tech Data | TECD | 20.14 | 22.11 | 23.21 | 23.64 | 1.9% | 1.18 |
| Yahoo | YHOO | 13.60 | 13.18 | 13.34 | 13.47 | 1.0% | 18.78 |
| Dow | .DJI | 7278.38 | 7776.18 | 8017.59 | 8083.38 | 0.8% | N/A |
| FTSE 100 | .FTSE | 3842.85 | 3898.85 | 4029.67 | 3983.71 | -1.1% | N/A |
| NASDAQ | .IXIC | 1457.27 | 1545.20 | 1621.87 | 1652.54 | 1.9% | N/A |
