The blue chips have a nice little advance going, but the semiconductors are really dragging things down.

With the market for Portable Media Player (PMP) semiconductors essentially doubling to $6.4 billion in 2009, the stakes in the portable video-processing market are high.

It's like a little boy dragging a dead cat around by the tail. After a while the thrill wears off.

A lot of this will be based around either retaining the minutes on the mobile network or dragging the minutes back onto the fixed network. If you're an IT manager, then pulling minutes back onto the fixed network through your own PBX will have enormous cost savings.

It was a totally technical rebound after the decline of Thursday. The stocks that stood out were blue-chips that were battered previously, especially the service and telecommunications sector.

It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.