Stocks were headed for their third straight big sell-off on Monday when bargain hunters stepped in, erasing a nearly 2 percent loss by the close.
The latest volatility on fears over Europe’s debt woes came ahead of a couple of big earnings reports this week from the tech sector: HP (NYSE: HPQ) will report its results after the close on Tuesday, while Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) will announce its quarterly earnings on Thursday.
Analysts are looking for earnings of $1.05 a share from HP on a 9 percent increase in sales to $29.82 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. They’ll also be looking for comments on the state of IT spending and any plans that HP may reveal for its Palm (NASDAQ: PALM) acquisition.
Dell is expected to report earnings of 26 cents a share on a 15.3 percent revenue increase to $14.23 billion.
The chip sector led the way back today, with SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK), Micron (NASDAQ: MU) and Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) gaining around 2 percent each as the Nasdaq ended the day up 0.3 percent.
Dell and HP won’t be the only names reporting this week. Applied Materials (NASDAQ: AMAT), Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) and Tech Data (NASDAQ: TECD) will also report earnings this week.
InfoLogix (NASDAQ: IFLG) continued its big gains, this time on a deal with Samsung Mobile, but Hauppauge Digital (NASDAQ: HAUP) ran into some profit-taking, down 28 percent after big gains last week on a streaming TV app for Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPad, iPod and iPhone.
TiVo (NASDAQ: TIVO) stabilized after a big plunge Friday on a setback in its patent case against Dish Network (NASDAQ: DISH).