Apple’s Results Shine

Shares of Apple rocketed 6% to a new high Tuesday after the company said its quarterly results will come in well above Wall Street estimates.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the Macworld conference that the company’s sales came in at $5.7 billion, compared to analysts’ $5 billion forecasts. The results were driven by sales of 14 million iPods, also well above predictions, and the company hit $1 billion in retail sales for the first time and sold 1.25 million Macs in the quarter.

Apple also got a boost from the earlier than expected adoption of Intel chips.

Apple will officially report results Jan. 18.

Stocks overcame early weakness on disappointing results from Dow component Alcoa to end the day unchanged.

The Nasdaq added 1 to 2320, the S&P 500 was down half a point to 1289, and the Dow gave back a third of a point to 11,011. Volume rose to 2.37 billion shares on the NYSE, but declined to 2.01 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led 18-15 on the NYSE, and 17-12 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 50% on the NYSE, and 56% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 267-18 on the NYSE, and 182-28 on the Nasdaq.

AMD jumped 5% after Piper Jaffray said Dell could begin using the company’s chips later this year. Shanda also rose on a Piper upgrade.

JDA and Bell Micro tumbled on warnings.

Overland surged 18% after raising guidance.

Amazon fell 3% on an RBC downgrade.

Juniper gained 5.7% on a management shakeup that included the hiring of a Cisco official.