As you may have noticed, Apple felt moved to address the publicity surrounding reception issues with the iPhone 4 when held in a certain way, with an emergency press conference on Friday.
Apple stock has been an incredible performer for the past year or so. If only we'd sold everything we owned and put it all in Apple shares in early March 2009, when they cost around $85... They've since tripled, so it's quite strange to see a fall, however small.
Most analysts seem to think the press event addressed the problem adequately, but Apple's shares still fell by around a percent on Friday and have fallen further at the start of trading today. This issue in isolation is probably not a very big deal - there will be no recall and Apple will still sell tonnes of iPhones. But the longer-term damage to Apple's image is another matter entirely.
The other notable faller last week was graphics company NVIDIA. One trend that has snuck up on us is the relative performance of NVIDIA and rival AMD's shares in the past year. NVIDIA use to be twice the size of AMD by market cap, but now they're less than a billion dollars apart.
Qualcomm was the big winner among our shares last week amid a general consensus that its shares are probably trading too low and represent a bit of a bargain.
| Company | Listing | Share price 28/6/10 | Share price 5/7/10 | Share price 12/7/10 | Share price 19/7/10 | 7-day change | Market cap (bn) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD | AMD | 8.09 | 7.17 | 7.34 | 7.37 | 0.4% | 4.96 |
| Apple | AAPL | 266.70 | 247.00 | 259.62 | 249.90 | -3.7% | 227.39 |
| ARM | ARMH | 12.79 | 12.38 | 13.60 | 13.79 | 1.4% | 6.05 |
| Avnet | AVT | 25.76 | 23.98 | 25.13 | 24.75 | -1.5% | 3.76 |
| Cisco | CSCO | 22.18 | 21.13 | 22.70 | 22.75 | 0.2% | 129.93 |
| Dell | DELL | 12.93 | 12.03 | 12.85 | 13.06 | 1.6% | 25.58 |
| GOOG | 472.68 | 436.55 | 467.49 | 459.61 | -1.7% | 146.38 | |
| HP | HPQ | 45.92 | 42.81 | 45.25 | 46.20 | 2.1% | 107.85 |
| IBM | IBM | 127.12 | 121.86 | 127.96 | 128.03 | 0.1% | 164.18 |
| Ingram Micro | IM | 15.80 | 15.12 | 15.60 | 15.80 | 1.3% | 2.61 |
| Intel | INTC | 20.03 | 19.20 | 20.26 | 21.02 | 3.8% | 116.96 |
| Microsoft | MSFT | 24.53 | 23.27 | 24.27 | 24.89 | 2.6% | 218.13 |
| Nokia | NOK | 8.25 | 8.43 | 8.48 | 8.74 | 3.1% | 32.73 |
| Nvidia | NVDA | 11.08 | 10.26 | 10.35 | 10.05 | -2.9% | 5.75 |
| Oracle | ORCL | 22.66 | 21.83 | 23.36 | 23.27 | -0.4% | 116.96 |
| Qualcomm | QCOM | 34.57 | 32.37 | 33.91 | 35.96 | 6.0% | 58.99 |
| Tech Data | TECD | 38.28 | 35.95 | 38.11 | 37.92 | -0.5% | 1.92 |
| Dow | .DJI | 10143.81 | 9686.48 | 10198.03 | 10097.90 | -1.0% | N/A |
| FTSE 100 | .FTSE | 5073.98 | 4838.09 | 5132.94 | 5158.85 | 0.5% | N/A |
| NASDAQ | .IXIC | 2223.48 | 2091.79 | 2196.45 | 2179.05 | -0.8% | N/A |
