Tuesday's early afternoon trade: Strong blue-chip results power Wall Street rally

The three main Wall Street indexes rose more than 1.5 percent on Tuesday as upbeat earnings from blue-chips such as Johnson & Johnson and Goldman Sachs eased jitters over the impact of rising interest rates and tariffs on corporate profits.
All the 11 major S&P sectors were higher, with nine of them up more than 1 percent. Technology stocks, which led the market selloff last week, and health stocks jumped more than 2 percent.
Insurer UnitedHealth rose 3.8 percent and J&J 2.1 percent after the two Dow components topped estimates for quarterly profit and boosted their earnings forecast for the year.
Morgan Stanley rose 5.4 percent and Goldman Sachs 1.8 percent after they wrapped up earnings from the top six US lenders with better-than-expected quarterly profits.
Walmart gained 1.9 percent after saying it expects US online sales to jump about 40 percent this fiscal year and that profitability in the business was in "good shape". The stock had fallen earlier after the retailer cut its profit forecast for the year.
Strong earnings reports along with solid data from the Labour Department, which showed US job openings jumped to a record high in August, is helping the sentiment, said Kim Forrest, senior portfolio manager at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.
The data suggests that companies are seeing demand for their products and services and are hiring people to fulfill them, Forrest added.
Healthy earnings from some of the biggest US companies will help soothe nerves of investors who have been fretting over the impact of tariffs, rising interest rates and wages on corporate profits. Those fears, along with a spike in Treasury yields last week, led to a selloff.
Earnings at S&P 500 companies are expected to have risen 21.8 percent in the third quarter, a slowdown from the past two quarters, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv.
At 12:46 a.m. EDT the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 402.84 points, or 1.60 percent, at 25,653.39, the S&P 500 was up 43.84 points, or 1.59 percent, at 2,794.63 and the Nasdaq Composite was up 155.21 points, or 2.09 percent, at 7,585.95.
Netflix rose 1.7 percent ahead of its earnings report, expected after the bell. The video streaming company will be the first to report results among the high-flying FAANG group, the shares of which were at the center of last week's selloff.