A Martian landing on earth might be forgiven for believing that Baltimore Technologies had gone into liquidation if he read much of what has been written about the group in the past few weeks.

All that has happened is that Baltimore - a classic victim of the dot.com hysteria - has fallen out of one 100-share index (admittedly the most prestigious one in Britain) to a less prestigious 250-share index. Nothing more - the company is pretty much the same as it was when it ascended into the Footsie club three months ago. All that has changed is that investment markets have returned to a semblance of reality.

Maybe Baltimore management might have done something to play down some of the hysteria surrounding the shares when they went as high as £15 and strolled on to the Footsie. But on the other hand Henry Beker and Fran Rooney hardly did their Footsie cause much good when they unloaded £5.8 million sterling (€9.3 million) worth of Baltimore stock into the market just three weeks before the 100share index was due to be rejigged.

That was a serious miscalculation and both men (and their advisers) should have known that selling so many shares at so low a price simply sent all the wrong signals to a market that had already become disillusioned with shares being valued on a multiple of their sales, rather than boring and mundane things like profits and earnings.

Baltimore is still about the 120th biggest company on the London Stock Market and although its market value is less than half of what it was a few months ago, that £2.3 billion sterling market capitalisation still represents an awful lot of hope value.

But is Baltimore, with sales last year of £23.3 million, all that different from Bookham, a company that only floated in the last couple of months and is replacing Baltimore in the Footsie.

Bookham - involved in designing fibreoptic technology - is now worth £4.5 billion sterling with sales last year of just £3.5 million (yes, million). An awful lot of hope built into Bookham's share price too!

Apart from Baltimore and its Footsie tribulations, there is a legitimate question about the way this index - and indeed many others are compiled. There are many who believe that the biggest losers in all this constant chopping and changing are the tracker funds which are obliged to adjust their portfolios to reflect changes in the FTSE and other indices. Tracker funds have been hugely popular in Ireland in recent years, and have generally been marketed on the basis of their lower risk and lower costs.

Selling a bunch of shares that have fallen out of an index and buying the ones that have moved into that index means more commission for brokers and, quite often, capital losses on the sale of the shares sold when they fall out of the index.

Maybe people thinking of investing in the supposed safety of tracker funds should think twice before they dig deep into their pockets. And maybe some of the tracker fund providers might sound a warning to investors about the increasingly volatile markets into which their money is being ploughed.