HEXUS.sharewatch: The ARM and NVIDIA slides continue

The table below shows tech companies generally gaining last week as US shares experienced a lift from the growing likelihood of there being a second round of quantitative easing - referred to as QE2 - over there.

While this move would be a response to the weakness of the US economic recovery and the threat of a double-dip recession, it would also be undertaken to increase American internationals competitiveness by devaluing the dollar. Not only would this effectively reduce the value of dollar debt - of which the US has approximately one shed-load - but it would mean US exports would become more competitively priced.

But there were two notable exceptions to this minor euphoria last week: ARM and NVIDIA. This continues a trend we have observed for the past few sharewatches.

ARM, we feel, was the beneficiary of a speculative bubble as the true extent of the potential promised by the mobile Internet market became apparent. Everyone soon realised that the common denominator in this market, and the company that has managed to scare even tech titans such as Intel, is little old UK chip designer ARM. Furthermore, with more companies looking to get into the chip business, ARM has been the focus of a lot of takeover rumours.

NVIDIA is probably still suffering from strategic, legal and manufacturing setbacks, such as the slow appearance of its Tegra SoC in the wild and the cost of its packaging problems. NVIDIA was one of the beneficiaries when Oracle's Larry Ellison said he fancied buying a chip company a couple of weeks ago, but it has lost all of that gain now.