Fresh records on Wall Street as US outlook improves

A woman walks by the New York Stock Exchange on Wall St. Photo / Getty

Wall Street climbed, with the Dow and the S&P 500 touching record highs, amid optimism about the outlook for the US economy and corporate profits.

In afternoon trading in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.13 percent, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index advanced 0.19 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite Index gained 0.18 percent.

Gains in shares of IBM and those of Nike, up 1.2 percent and 1.1 percent respectively, led the Dow higher. Earlier in the day, the Dow touched a record high 17,618.46, while the S&P 500 reached a record 2,038.70.

Shares of Dean Foods rallied, last 13.2 percent higher, after the company posted results that bettered expectations, helped by cutting costs.

"The company's cost reduction efforts are finally starting to show up in results," Key Banc Capital Markets analyst Akshay Jagdale wrote in a note, Reuters reported.

Thomson Reuters data showed that of 448 companies in the S&P 500 to report earnings, 74.6 percent beat expectations, above the 63 percent beat rate since 1994 and 67 percent for the past four quarters.

Shares of McDonald's were steady after the company reported a decline October sales that was smaller than expected.

October sales were "very encouraging, the most encouraging I would say is the US," Peter Saleh, a New York-based analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, told Bloomberg News. "The traffic trend improved from September to October."

On the flipside, shares of Time Warner Cable and Comcast fell, last down 4.8 percent and 4.3 percent respectively, after President Barack Obama called for regulation of the internet by reclassifying broadband as a utility. Shares of Cablevision Systems were last 2.4 percent weaker.

Oil slid amid expectations OPEC won't decrease its output. West Texas Intermediate crude for December delivery dropped 1.6 percent to US$77.41.

"I don't think there will be any cut in the production" at the OPEC meeting this month, Kuwait Oil Minister Ali Al-Omair said said at a conference in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Bloomberg News reported. "We feel prices will settle down once surplus oil is absorbed."

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 finished the day with a 0.7 percent increase from the previous close, as did the UK's FTSE 100 Index and Germany's DAX. France's CAC 40 climbed 0.8 percent.

Here, shares of Carlsberg rose 3.1 percent after posting quarterly profit that met expectations and after it stuck with its full-year outlook.

About three-quarters of European companies have reported results so far this earnings season, of which 60 percent have met or surpassed profit forecasts, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine data.