Offshore Investment News It’s a sorry story on the whole and the unexpected thing is that the bad news - and the occasional snippets of good news as well - have been so very evenly spread between both large and small companies alike. Amazon, Yahoo!, Apple, Intel, Nokia, Ericsson, Sony - the list of large-company casualties is becoming so long that it’s reasonable for us to ask how many of them will still exist in their current form at all by the time the new year’s out. Do we have your full attention now? The world’s most important market for tech stocks, without a doubt, is, of course, the Nasdaq, the automated US market which has provided most of the impetus for its many European and Japanese imitators over the past two years. The Nasdaq succeeds where the New York Stock Exchange fails because it brings together thousands of investors who not only want to buy into small companies, but who also understand the special constraints that they work under. By attracting people who aren’t fazed by the lack of a p/e ratio, the Nasdaq and its rivals create a special pool of liquidity which would have been impossible under any of the more traditional stock exchanges. Offshore Investment News - Historical Curiosity It’s merely a matter of historical curiosity now that the Nasdaq doubled in value between October 1999 and April 2000, driven by a surging tide of media interest in the newly-fashionable technology sector (and driven also by the countless technology venture capital funds which were rapidly spreading across the Atlantic at the time). But its headlong fall in the spring of 2000 and its subsequent collapse in the late summer made it apparent that the situation was much blacker than most people had expected. By mid-December 2000 the index was roughly back where it had been 15 months earlier, and not just professionals but millions of private investors were left licking their wounds.
The Nasdaq’s fate was almost exactly mirrored by London’s techMARK (which is actually a part of the London Stock Exchange, so it’s not strictly an automated exchange, though it has pretensions). The techMARK rocketed predictably from its starting level of 2400 in November 1999 to a peak of 5700 in March 2000, but it then dropped back horrendously to reach an unsteady plateau of 2800 in December 2000. Meanwhile Easdaq, the most important of the European tech markets (and a true automated exchange) stumbled to an even worse degree, losing around 60 per cent of its value between April and December. This was particularly surprising because the Easdaq, unlike its British or American counterparts, carries an awful lot of biotechnology and pharmaceutical stocks. Offshore Investment News & Japan Japan, predictably, followed suit - though this time its domestic disgrace was worsened by the already-deepening confidence crisis in the Japanese financial system as a whole (the Nikkei fell from 21000 to 15000 in the same period). Tokyo’s Jasdaq index collapsed from its peak of 130 in March 2000 (up from just 28 in January 1999) to a forlorn 60 by December, and there are still few hopes of a quick revival. The Tokyo shock was all the more pronounced because foreign investors have a profound respect for Japanese consumer electronics products. If the markets are telling us anything at all at the moment, it is that there’s very little money to be made from direct sales to consumers. The technology companies that are still flourishing are the ones that sell to other businesses. And those are areas where Japan has consistently failed to shine. Some people say that Japanese technologists are better at adapting existing ideas than they are at developing completely new ones; others say simply that the English language (still hardly spoken in Japan) puts the country at a disadvantage even against software-producing countries like India. For more relevant news items and magazine articles please click the links below: News: Click here for the latest news from Investment International. Article: Click here for alternative investments. 
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