Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) led a big stock market rally Wednesday, as investor optimism returned ahead of second-quarter earnings reports.
The major indexes jumped 3 percent on the day as the Dow climbed back above 10,000.
Cisco and Dell led a long list of stocks gaining around 5 percent or more. Others posting big gains were EMC (NYSE: EMC), VMware (NYSE: VMW), AMD (NYSE: AMD), Micron (NYSE: MU), Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN), Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU), Tellabs (NASDAQ: TLAB) and Xilinx (NASDAQ: XLNX).
Netlist (NASDAQ: NLST) soared 22 percent on news that its flash cache technology will be used in Dell storage systems.
FBR offered cautiously optimistic comments on chip demand, while EMC benefited from an Oppenheimer upgrade.
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) will kick off technology sector earnings reports next Tuesday, with AMD and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) reporting on July 15.
Today’s rally came as Investors Intelligence reported that investment advisor sentiment had narrowed to 37 percent bulls to 35 percent bears, the narrowest spread in a year. High bearish sentiment can be a sign that stocks are nearing a bottom, but bears climbed above 50 percent during the 2007-2009 bear market.