Amid the stock market misery of recent days, Begbies Traynor yesterday stuck out like a shiny new penny in the mud. Recent trading has been "extraordinary" said chairman Ric Traynor. After a horribly quiet 2007, culminating in a December profit warning, business levels have picked up enormously, he beamed.

Most people will not have heard of Begbies Traynor. If you run your own business, hope to God that you will not need to. For Begbies Traynor is a specialist firm of insolvency and corporate rescuers: bankruptcy specialists in laymen's terms.

Traynor's besuited men and women go into businesses on the brink of collapse, generally having been called in by worried creditors. At the start, they will apply first aid and intensive care, but if the business has to be declared dead, they will don funeral garb and attempt to salvage as much value as possible for those owed money.

Business class airline Silverjet, Alphasteel and disastrous loans investor Carlyle Capital Corp have all been administered in their death throes by Traynor's people.

Savvy investors started piling in to Begbies last December, just as the credit crunch started turning really nasty. For their nous, they have been rewarded with a near-doubling of the share price since.

There are some brave hearts who declare that, with the FTSE 100 index officially entering a bear market, now is the time to invest in bombed-out sectors such as housebuilding, banking and property.

But for those investors who want to find corners of the stock market that are slightly less risky, there are still options available:

Pawnbrokers

Cash-strapped borrowers unable to pay off their debts are turning to pawnbrokers, handing over gold, diamonds and other valuables to raise money to pay off debts and make ends meet. Albemarle & Bond, Britain's biggest pawnbroker, has seen its pawn book grow substantially in the past year.

"The key drivers of the business are not only economic downturn but also the increasing unwillingness of the mainstream banking system to lend to the poor, an to a lesser extent immigration," says Michael O'Brien at Collins Stewart. We are close to "the perfect storm" for Albemarle, he says, because customers cannot get

cash elsewhere and are increasingly in need of funds as disposable incomes fall.

Drugs

Pharmaceuticals stocks are a traditional defensive play in times of turmoil and although they have been in the doldrums for the last few years, the City reckons they are making something of a comeback now.

A shortage of blockbuster drugs and cheap imitations of bestsellers have hit revenues in recent times but an ageing population and demand for medical advances in fields such as cancer and Aids suggest the likes of GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca have a steady future.

The sector has been boosted by a court ruling in the US that stopped a generic challenge to Astra's second-bestselling drug Seroquel, a treatment for schizophrenia.

Tobacco

Britain, parts of Europe and other areas of the Western world may have introduced smoking bans but there is little sign of the appetite for cigarettes waning in eastern Europe, South America and Asia, particularly China.

This is where the big tobacco companies are focusing, guaranteeing them a steady and indeed growing income stream as these emerging economies expand.

Tobacco is another classic defensive play and the sector has performed better than many in the last 12 months.

Commodities

Record crude and metals prices have boosted earnings for oil and mining stocks, sending their shares soaring. There is much debate over whether prices are being driven by speculators and we are in a bubble or by the simple market forces of supply and demand. Oil and metal prices have eased from record highs in recent days but with demand still raging in expanding economies such as China and India there are few out there forecasting significant falls.

Supermarkets

Supermarkets are another sector that tends to avoid much of the flak when the economic chips are down. Fans say that, no matter how bad it gets, people still have to eat. In the current environment, however, investors have been fretting over the impact of inflation on the profit margins of the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury's. As people's wallets feel the pinch of food price inflation running at around 8%, many are now trading down to the cut-price likes of Aldi and Lidl, meaning potential defections from the big British players.

Such worries have meant shares in the food and drug retail sector are currently down almost a quarter from their peak in October last year. The charts for the individual shares are even worse. Sainsbury's shares are worth nearly half of what they were a year ago, Tesco's are down by a quarter. A buying opportunity for the brave, perhaps?

Utilities

Water, gas and electricity companies are another staple defensive sector for recessionary times. People will always need to cook and wash, preferably with the lights on. The businesses are generally highly regulated in terms of how much they are allowed to charge. That means you get fairly reliable, if unexciting, revenue streams coming into them. That certainty is also reflected in investors' confidence that the companies will be capable of paying healthy dividends - not a prospect likely in many other sectors nowadays. However, utilities also carry the risk of regulatory interference. The water and gas regulators have just given them fairly easy new restrictions on prices, but another round in 18 months is expected to be less generous.

Jeremy Batstone-Carr of Charles Stanley points out, however: "Investors have been coming into utilities in the past few weeks because they like the certainty of earnings now, rather than worrying about what might happen in 2009."