STOCK MARKET VOLATILITY: A COMPARISON OF COMPUTER AND CELLULAR HARDWARE COMPANIES

Stock market volatility has been omnipresent in the information technology sector. This manuscript compares the stock performance of computer and cellular hardware companies across six different twenty-month periods between the years 1996-2006. The focus periods include the browser era, the Y2K era, the post-Y2K era, the post-9/11 era, the outsourcing era and the mobile/wireless era. The lowest stock market returns are in the Y2K or post-9/11 eras for all eight firms. The highest stock market returns for the eight companies in the study focus on four different eras. The results imply that while computer and cellular hardware companies have a tendency to decline in price in a down market, positive return periods in a bull market are not highly correlated within the industry.