We cashed in our chips with three share sales last week as stock markets took fright over the nail- biting climax to Scotland's great independence debate.

Virtually all of our recommendation lost some ground but Glasgow's Smart Metering Systems, engineer IMI and cash-and-carry specialist Booker were the only ones to trigger sell signals after their share prices fell a full 10% from previous peaks.

The disposals realised a small overall profit with gains from Smart Metering cancelling out losses from the other two notional investments.

We were not too unhappy to increase our cash reserves as we await Friday's results but believe there will be some good bargains to be had once markets settle down.

Companies with major Scottish interest were hard hit in last week's sell-off with banking groups Lloyds, RBS and TSB suffering sharp write downs on regulatory uncertainties.

Our other tips to go on the retreat included Glasgow-based STV which shed around 6% of its recent gains on scare stories that Scots would have less cash after independence.

Alternative energy supplier Infinis, headed by former SSE boss Ian Marchant, slipped back on worries that a rump UK would cut back on subsidies to its Scottish interests.

There were some more surprising casualties also with overseas earners such as Ricardo, Dialight, Signet, Compass and IndigoVision among those to lose ground although they stand to gain from the weakness of the pound against the US dollar.

All four of our investment portfolios showed falls from recent high points when we carried out our review of progress on Wednesday with the 2012 and 2011 selections both down by almost 3% over the week.

The other two portfolios shed almost 2% over their total valuations.