U.S. stock markets opened opened higher Thursday as investors shrugged off sour news from Bear Stearns and FedEx and focused on uplifting results from Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) and Nike (NKE, Fortune 500).
The Dow Jones industrial average and S&P 500 each opened 0.5% higher and the tech-heavy Nasdaq started up nearly 1 percent.
Oracle beat fiscal second-quarter profit forecasts and gave earnings and sales guidance that was at or above current estimates. Shares soared 6 percent in heavy Frankfurt trading early Thursday.
Nike saw shares rise more than 4 percent in Frankfurt as it beat forecasts due to strong international sales, which were helped by the weak dollar.
Investors seemed to shrug off much weaker earnings reports from embattled Wall Street firm Bear Stears as well as FedEx that were reported early Thursday.
Bear Stearns (BSC, Fortune 500) reported a bigger than expected loss, as it reported a .9 billion writedown that was 58 percent larger than its earlier estimate.
Even with the worse than forecast results, shares of Bear Stearns edged higher in pre-market trading, as investors were relieved it didn't report a much bigger subprime hit along the line of the additional .7 billion writedown reported Wednesday by Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500).
Investors also shrugged off news late Wednesday that Barclays Bank sued Bear Stearns, charging the firm misrepresented the health of one of its failed hedge funds.
FedEx (FDX, Fortune 500) said higher fuel prices and a slowdown in the U.S. economy ate into earnings. Still shares gained more than 1 percent as it edged past analysts' forecasts, even though it gave disappointing guidance for current quarter earnings that is below current estimates.
General Motors (GM, Fortune 500) could announce the sale of its medium-duty truck business to Navistar International as early as Thursday morning, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The sales price of the unit, which sells about 50,000 vehicles a year, including dump trucks and small buses, was not reported.
And Ford Motor (F, Fortune 500) could announce as soon as Friday that Indian automaker Tata could be named the "preferred bidder" for its Jaguar and Land Rover units as soon as Friday, according to a published reports.
All auto stocks could get a lift after the Environmental Protection Agency announced late Wednesday that it was blocking California's bid for first-in-the-nation greenhouse gas limits on passenger cars and trucks.
Credit rating agency Moody's announced it is reviewing the credit ratings of Hovnanian Enterprises (HOV, Fortune 500), the nation's No. 6 home builder by revenue, for a possible downgrade deeper into junk bond status the day after it reported its fifth consecutive quarterly loss.
The government's final reading on third-quarter gross domestic product was left unchanged Thursday at 4.9 percent rate of growth, as forecast. A report on leading economic indicators comes after the market open, as does the Philadelphia Fed index, a regional manufacturing survey.
In global trade, Asian stocks finished mixed, with Tokyo's Nikkei closing little changed after the Bank of Japan left rates unchanged and a governor told reporters that country's economy is slowing due to weakness in housing investment and cautious corporate sentiment. European markets edged higher in morning trading.
Oil prices continued Wednesday's rally, with a barrel of light sweet crude gaining 51 cents to .75 in early trading. |
