By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Wall Street opened with a bounce on Tuesday after its worst daily loss in more than three months on Monday, as fears about the novel coronavirus in China abated somewhat.
The market was undeterred by a durable goods report that suggested defense was the only sector that really enjoyed the end of 2019. Core orders excluding defense goods fell 2.5% on the month in December and November’s figures were revised down to 0.5% drop from a 0.7% increase reported originally.
Those figures cast something of a shadow over the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting, which is due to get under way later Tuesday, but chimed with a quarterly report from Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT), the U.S.’s biggest defense contractor, that showed profit up nearly 20% from a year earlier, thanks in part to rising sales of the F35 combat jet. Lockheed stock was up 1.0% at a new all-time high.
By contrast, industrial giant 3M (NYSE:MMM) fell 3.5% to a six-week low after saying it will cut 1,500 jobs worldwide as it comes to terms with sluggish demand out of Asia. The company’s fourth-quarter profit fell 28% due to litigation and restructuring charges.
By 9:50 AM ET (1445 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 85 points, or 0.3%, while the S&P 500 was up 0.5% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.7%.
Among the biggest movers were auto parts supplier Delphi, which surged 61% after rival BorgWarner (NYSE:BWA) announced it would buy the company in an all-stock deal valuing at $3.3 billion. BorgWarner’s stock fell 7.3% on perceptions that it is overpaying.
Elsewhere, Harley-Davidson (NYSE:HOG) fell 2.7% to a three-month low after a quarterly report that again showed its core motorcycle business in an apparently irreversible decline in the U.S. (even if it forecast flat revenues for the key division this year).
Airline stocks staged a modest recovery after tumbling on Monday, but the fear that the coronavirus will hit air travel numbers this year was still clearly in evidence. United Airlines (NASDAQ:UAL), American Airlines (NASDAQ:AAL) and Delta Airlines (NYSE:DAL) all rebounded less than 1% after declines of as much as 6% on Monday. Likewise, Booking.com (NASDAQ:BKNG) managed only a 0.2% rebound from the seven-week low it registered.
In other markets, U.S. crude oil futures were unable to hold on to earlier gains and fell 0.1% to $53.07 a barrel, while the dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose 0.2% to a two-month high of 97.920.