Shares Indices in Dec and 2007

As it turned out, December had none of the fireworks we saw in the previous couple of months. Indices across the board were pretty steady, moving in lthe low single digits.

How different this was to the year as a whole. The headline figures still look reasonably good for the year with NASDAQ up 10%, In the UK Techmark up 9% and Telcom up 22% with the mobile sector (thanks largely to Vodafone) up a massive 33%.

Software & Computer Services did not fair as well with the FTSE UK SCS Index down 6.9% on the year. As you can see from the chart below, it had been UP 7.3% in early Nov 07 but then…well, the word ‘crash’ seems appropriate for the 14% dive in less than two months.

Support Services – which covers the BPO players and the ITSAs – fared even worse with a 12% decline on the year.

Excluding the smaller companies with valuations <£100m, the three worst performers in 2007 were SThree (down 42%), Detica (down 42%) and Logica (down 37%). The three BEST performers were Autonomy (up 73%), Dimension Data (up 43%) and NCC (up 35%)