Last year saw a remarkably strong stock market rally, considering many of the consequences of the financial crisis remained unresolved. The Dow, FTSE and NASDAQ all finished the year around 50 percent higher than they were in early March.
By the end of January 2010, however, whatever blind optimism drove investors to push up shares so vigorously has disappeared. Regardless of how many companies beat expectations with their Q4 earnings, investors seem to have realised they got a bit over-excited last year and they'd better chill for a bit.
So last month saw the worst share performance since February 2009 as all three of our indices fell. In fact, the drop-off only actually occurred over the past couple of weeks, having continued to rise prior to that. As we wrote last week, the reasons for this are political and macroeconomic, so everyone's affected and all three indices are in danger of dropping below psychologically significant round numbers.
Except Nokia, it seems. The Finnish handset maker completed a difficult 2009 with a quarter that significantly exceeded expectations, and announced an improved performance in the crucial smartphone sector. This may have been enough to contribute to ARM's relatively good performance and offset a nightmare week for Qualcomm's shares after it offered a down-beat outlook.
Company | Listing | Share price 20/12/09 | Share price 20/1/10 | Share price 24/1/10 | Share price 31/1/10 | 7-day change | Market cap (bn) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
AMD | AMD | 9.05 | 9.01 | 7.88 | 7.46 | -5.3% | 5.00 |
Apple | AAPL | 195.50 | 215.04 | 197.59 | 192.06 | -2.8% | 174.16 |
ARM | ARMH | 8.25 | 9.18 | 8.94 | 9.07 | 1.5% | 3.87 |
Avnet | AVT | 29.09 | 28.58 | 27.08 | 26.44 | -2.4% | 4.00 |
Cisco | CSCO | N/A | 24.85 | 22.97 | 22.47 | -2.2% | 129.26 |
Dell | DELL | 13.74 | 14.81 | 13.65 | 12.90 | -5.5% | 25.24 |
GOOG | 596.27 | 587.62 | 550.01 | 529.94 | -3.6% | 168.14 | |
HP | HPQ | 51.50 | 52.75 | 49.29 | 47.07 | -4.5% | 111.28 |
IBM | IBM | 127.91 | 134.14 | 125.50 | 122.39 | -2.5% | 160.33 |
Ingram Micro | IM | 17.39 | 17.84 | 17.27 | 16.90 | -2.1% | 2.77 |
Intel | INTC | 19.63 | 21.05 | 19.91 | 19.40 | -2.6% | 107.13 |
Microsoft | MSFT | 30.24 | 31.10 | 28.96 | 28.18 | -2.7% | 250.21 |
Nokia | NOK | N/A | 13.24 | 12.72 | 13.69 | 7.6% | 50.76 |
Nvidia | NVDA | 16.82 | 17.43 | 16.46 | 15.39 | -6.5% | 8.54 |
Oracle | ORCL | N/A | 25.33 | 24.15 | 23.06 | -4.5% | 115.56 |
Qualcomm | QCOM | 44.56 | 49.32 | 46.78 | 39.19 | -16.2% | 65.46 |
Tech Data | TECD | 45.98 | 45.99 | 43.44 | 40.75 | -6.2% | 2.07 |
Dow | .DJI | 10328.89 | 10725.43 | 10172.98 | 10067.33 | -1.0% | N/A |
FTSE 100 | .FTSE | 5196.81 | 5503.86 | 5302.99 | 5188.52 | -2.2% | N/A |
NASDAQ | .IXIC | 2211.69 | 2320.40 | 2205.29 | 2147.35 | -2.6% | N/A |