Wall Street Bulls Return

Traders' screens finally turned from red to green on Thursday, as broad-based buying sent stocks higher.

The ISDEX rose 18 to 769, and the Nasdaq climbed 80 to 3736. The S&P 500 charged ahead 25 to 1451, and the Dow soared 177 to 10,805. Volume declined to 495 million shares on the NYSE and 845 million on the Nasdaq. Advancers led 16 to 9 on the NYSE and 19 to 16 on the Nasdaq. For earnings reports, visit our earnings calendar and reported earnings. For after hours quotes and news, visit our new after hours trading site.

Big-cap Internet leaders recovered some of their recent losses. Yahoo regained 6 3/16 to 96 9/16 on positive comments from Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget and others. The stock broke down at 99 1/2-99 3/4 yesterday, the May and August bottoms, and needs to get back above 100 to correct the technical damage. eBay gained 5 11/16 to 69 3/16, and Amazon rose 2 1/16 to 39 15/16.

Priceline recovered 15/16 to 11 11/16 a day after falling 40% on an earnings warning that carried the rest of the Net sector down with it. A technical comment and chart on Priceline: When Priceline was at $25, we said it looked like there could be further downside ahead, and here's why: the stock broke a descending triangle, a flat-bottomed pattern with a descending upper boundary, at $32 back in July. As the size of the pattern was 18 points from peak (50) to trough (32), that gave the stock downside potential to $14, or 18 points below the break. For more on the Priceline story, click here.

The acquisition of Global Crossing's Web hosting business by Exodus was back on today. Exodus, off 2 3/16 to 51 1/16, will pay about $6.5 billion in stock, and said the deal will be accretive to EBITDA in 2001. Navisite gained 2 3/4 to 30 5/8, and Data Return added 1 5/8 to 17 5/8.

Telecom equipment stocks weathered a report by Sanford Bernstein that said growth in telecom equipment spending should slow from 28% this year to less than 20% next year. Cisco Systems slipped 5/16 to 57, but Nortel gained 3 1/2 to 62 15/16 and Juniper Networks rose 3 5/8 to 228 5/8. Cisco announced acquisitions of privately held Vovida Networks and IPCell technologies for $369 million in cash.

WebMD rose 1 7/16 to 12 11/16 after announcing the elimination of 1,100 jobs and a restructuring the company said will save $250 million a year. The company will divest its plastics and filtration technologies subsidiaries.

Intraware slipped 5/16 to 8 1/16 after beating estimates by 11 cents with a 33-cent loss.

Netcentives rose 7/8 to 7 1/16 after pre-announcing better than expected results.

PDA stocks were strong. Handspring soared 9 3/16 to 76 1/2, and Palm rose 3 1/8 to 52.

Copper Mountain , which dropped 10 points yesterday on various rumors of weakness in DSL business, recovered 1 3/8 to 40. The stock has been battered by rumors for weeks.

Some technical comments on the market: Note: We will now be including charts with the technical market commentary; just click on the links in the story below to go to them. If you have trouble accessing the charts via the email newsletter version, try this link: