Big Blue, Yahoo Don’t Disappoint

Yahoo and IBM posted quarterly results late Tuesday that were in line with Wall Street forecasts.

Yahoo shares jumped 5% in late trading after the company posted 32.5% sales growth to $1.09 billion, topping $1.08 billion forecasts. Earnings were 11 cents a share — 15 cents after accounting for stock options — compared to 11-cent estimates. Marketing services revenue was up 35%, while fee-based revenue grew 25%.

For the second quarter, Yahoo said it expects sales of $1.08-$1.16 billion, compared to $1.14 billion estimates.

“Yahoo had another strong performance this quarter,” Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said in a statement. “Our overall advertising business saw solid growth and our user numbers continued to climb. We believe that our business model and our focus on exploring new opportunities in emerging areas has set us apart from the competition and has enabled us to offer our users the best online experience and our advertisers the most value online.”

The company plans improvements to its search platform later this year that analysts hope will add more upside to the company’s results. The company will provide more details on those changes at its analyst day in May.

IBM, meanwhile, edged higher after beating estimates by 3 cents with earnings of $1.08 a share. Sales of $20.66 billion were just under $20.72 billion forecasts. After factoring in the sale of the company’s PC unit to Lenovo, sales growth was flat with the year-ago quarter, while earnings were up from last year’s 85 cents a share.

Also after the close, Texas Instruments beat estimates and raised guidance, while Motorola lost ground on margin and growth concerns.

Stocks rocketed Tuesday on tame wholesale inflation and Federal Reserve meeting minutes that suggested that the Fed’s two-year rate hike campaign is nearing its end.

Travelzoo , RSA , Imation and Digi surged on their results, with Travelzoo shares up more than 40%.

The Nasdaq soared 45 to 2356, the S&P 500 surged 22 to 1307, and the Dow soared 195 to 11,268. Volume rose to 2.57 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.25 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led 26-7 on the NYSE, and 22-8 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 90% on the NYSE, and 87% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 274-141 on the NYSE, and 208-47 on the Nasdaq.