With blue chips leading the way, stocks finished the Wednesday session on the plus side. The Dow Jones Industrials gained 171 points, while the Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 both rose more than 5 points. Solid quarterly results gave several big-name stocks a nice lift.
Shares of IBM jumped 8½ percent and United Technologies rose 5 1/3 percent.
Comcast ended 2018 on a strong note, with its quarterly profit surging 36 percent from a year earlier and revenue up 26 percent - to $27.85 billion. The company cited a big jump in high-speed internet customers and solid results at its NBCUniversal media unit. Comcast shares leaped 5 ½%.
Oil prices slipped today - a second-straight decline. March crude fell 39 cents to settle at $52.62 a barrel.