Those who might have been tempted to ‘Sell in May and Go away’ would be regretting it now. Indeed, July was one of the best months of the year. NASDAQ was up 6.6%; a 20% rise YTD. In the UK, the FTSE100 rose 6.5% - making a 12.3% gain YTD. The FTSE SCS Index, which most closely follows the UK companies we report upon in Hotviews, was up another 5.4% making a pretty respectable 21% gain YTD. The FTSE Support Services Index (which includes the BPO players like Capita) was up 7.4% in July; 20.7% YTD.
The very best performing sector this year has been Telecomms with a massive 30.7% rise YTD mainly on the back of BT and Vodafone– both of which did well again in July.
The stand out winner this month amongst UK quoted SITS stocks was Blur Group– up a massive 58%. Blur IPOed in Oct 12 at 82p and have risen nearly 250% to 282.5p. Last week it reported strong growth in Q2 – See Blur accelerates into Q3. Even our Mr Miller, the big cynic, declared ‘I now get it” after a lunch with founder Philip Letts. See Blur brings its biggest contract into focus.
Two education suppliers – Promethean World and RM - both recovered 32% and 31% this month. RM achieved this despite declining revenues.
At the other end of the scale 2 ergo fell 47% to 1.6p. Not surprising given the MXC Capital backed 1p share placing. See 2 ergo directors…err gone!Triad and Invu did their usual bouncing about a bit – both down 25% in the month.
Telecity, which has a market value approaching £2b, fell 12%. Although TeleCity continued its growth march in H1, analysts were concerned at margins and increased competition from the likes of Equinix.
Although Vin Murria’s Advanced Computer Software announced good results – See ACS:Organic record remains unbroken - their shares suffered a rare 10% reversal. Quindell continued its slide – down another 9% in July.
Amongst the global stocks, Facebook stormed ahead – up 49% this month and now back to its $38 IPO price. Their Q2 results were excellent as I said in Facebook – What a surprise. They really seemed to have cracked the mobile ad conundrum in a way not even Google has.
California-headquartered but India-centric IT services firm iGate got through its recent quarter (to 30th June) with seemingly no adverse impact on growth resulting from the unceremonious exit of CEO Phaneesh Murthy in May. See iGate grows as CEO search continues. Igate shares soared 43% in July. Indeed many of the Indian players had a good month, and a good Q2 reporting season, with Wipro up 26% (See Wipro holding steady), HCL up 21% (See HCL closes a more profitable year), Infosys up 21% (See The future starts again for Infosys) and TCS up 20% (See TCS off to a sprint).
At the other end of the global scale, Microsoft declined 8%. See Microsoft misses in Q4 – Surface takes part of the blame. This lead to Activist ValueAct to round on Microsoft. Can Steve Ballmer really hang on for that much longer?
Poor old Dell fell 6% to $12.5 – now below the $13.75 Michael Dell/SilverLake offer price. The deal looks less and less likely to get consummated by the day. See Dell faces more hurdles.