Intel Pushes Dow Past 10K

More than a decade after first clearing the milestone, the Dow closed back above 10,000 today, thanks to much better than expected quarterly results from Intel (NASDAQ: INTC).

Late Tuesday, the chip giant reported much stronger than expected sales and forecast a strong end to the year.

The news was good for only a 1.7 percent gain in shares of Intel, but along with better than expected results from JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM), the rest of the market rose 1.5 percent or more.

HP (NYSE: HPQ), AMD (NYSE: AMD), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Seagate (NYSE: STX) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) rose nearly 3 percent each.

ON Semi (NASDAQ: ONNN) gained 6 percent after setting a Nov. 4 earnings date.

On Thursday night, the earnings parade will continue with reports from AMD, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and IBM (NYSE: IBM).

Google is expected to report a 4.7 percent sales gain to $4.32 billion, according to Thomson Reuters, and earnings are expected to come in at $5.40 a share. Big Blue is forecast to earn $2.38 a share on a 7.6 percent sales decline to $23.38 billion, and analysts are looking for AMD to report a 42-cent loss on a 28.8 percent sales drop to $1.26 billion.

The Dow and S&P have rebounded more than 50 percent from the worst bear market since the Great Depression, but they still need to gain more than 40 percent to return to their all-time highs set in October 2007.

The Nasdaq rose 32 to 2172, the S&P 500 gained 18 to 1092, and the Dow surged 144 to 10,015. Volume rose to 4.41 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.38 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 28-9 margin on the NYSE, and 20-7 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 87 percent on the NYSE, and 79 percent on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 666-84 on the NYSE, and 255-10 on the Nasdaq.