HEXUS.sharewatch: AMD’s turn to lead the market down

It was another pretty gloomy week for stocks on the whole and some tech stocks have been especially hard hit.

Both US indices on our list dropped by over six percent and the FTSE was down seven percent as a general mood of pessimism descended over markets. The sentiment was that all the bad news has yet to come out and, with nasty surprises like higher than expected losses as HBOS, that's no great surprise.

Last week we commented that NVIDIA appears the most volatile stock on our list, but if that's the case AMD must come close second. It finally got shareholder approval for the spin-off of its manufacturing operations last week, but since then its stock has been in steady decline.

The pessimism about the economy on the whole has led many analysts to revise their expectations of capital expenditure from consumers and businesses alike. This would also have been a contributing factor in double figure percentage falls from Avnet and HP too.