US stocks in the blue as Dow Jones Industrials gains 68 points and S&P 500 another 14

US markets clambered into the blue on Thursday evening, buoyed by a spate of largely better-than-expected economic reports, but above all by soothing remarks from Fed speakers.

Key amongst the latter was St.Lous Fed president James Bullard, who suggested the US central bank should ponder the possibility of postponing the end of quantitative easing beyond the expected end date of October.

However, for some market watchers markets already started to recover on Wednesday evening, when equities began a bounce following a report that Fed Chair Janet Yellen continued to believe in the robustness of the US recovery.

On 15 October, at 18:31 BST, Bloomberg cited two people familiar with the remarks made by Yellen to the Group of 30 behind closed doors in Washington DC last weekend.

Coal (3.63%), Airlines (3.21%) and Consumer electronics (3.06%) were to be found amongst the best performing sectors as of the time of writing this report.

Notably, Bank of America was one of the most active stocks on the NYSE, and was trading comfortably in the blue, with some veteran traders saying that it stood to gain from the current bout of volatility, having made a tidy sum by dealing with the margin calls which naturally follow-on from episodes of market disruption like Wednesday’s.

Amongst the day’s main data releases, industrial production figures from the Federal Reserve showed output rising by a “healthy” 0.6% month-on-month in September, once automobile sales are excluded, according to Capital Economics. Total output rose by 1% on the month (consensus: 0.4%).

Industrial capacity utilisation hit 79.3% last month, a six-year high, putting it close to the long-term average of 80.1%.

The Chicago Board of Trade’s VIX options volatility index, Wall Street’s so-called ‘fear gauge’ was 2.59% lower at 25.57, after hitting an intra-day high of 29.41 and of 31.06 on Wednesday, which was almost a three-year high.