Stocks rebound; Alcoa beats; Oil price slide continues

Yahoo Finance

A rally is underway on Wall Street following two straight days of declines.

Investors seem to be shifting their attention to better-than-expected earnings from Alcoa and shrugging off another drop in oil prices.

Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli thinks it's the nature of the decline in oil that matters.

"If it's really rapid and disorderly...stocks traders will not be able to handle that for too long," Santoli says.

Alcoa (AA) reporting fourth quarter earnings and revenue that topped analysts' estimates.  Revenue jumped nearly 15% from a year earlier as it benefited from strong demand for automobiles and airplanes, as well as higher aluminum prices and lower energy costs. Shares of Alcoa are higher on the news.

Related: Best Buy and Apple jump on upgrades; RadioShack gets another lifeline

Best Buy (BBY) shares rose after Goldman Sachs upgraded the retailer to "buy" from "neutral” with a price target of $45 a share.  Goldman expects Best Buy to report solid holiday sales and an earnings beat for the fourth quarter and calls it "well-positioned" for 2015.

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RadioShack (RSH) soared in early trading. The struggling consumer electronics retailer is reportedly getting another lifeline.  Salus Capital has offered Radio-Shack a $500 million loan to fund its operations if it ends up in bankruptcy, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Apple (AAPL) and other computer makers such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) are on investors’ watch list. Two new reports find the big decline in global personal computer sales is beginning to level off as tablet ownership becomes more common.

Meantime, Credit Suisse upgraded Apple to "outperform" from "neutral" and raised its price target by $20 to $130 per share, citing strong sales of iPhones.

Another Fortune 500 company says it will pay it workers more.  Health insurer Aetna (AET) says will raise the wages of its lowest-paid employees to $16 dollars an hour as the labor market tightens up. This follows similar moves by Starbucks (SBUX) and The Gap (GPS).

Related: Paychecks finally making a comeback?

Big companies are not alone.  A new survey from the National Federation of Independent Business says 17% of small firms plan on raising wages in the next six months after recently increasing worker compensation by 25%.

And Facebook (FB) may know you better than anyone you know. Researchers at Stanford and the University of Cambridge analyzed the "likes" of Facebook users and they found by using those, a computer could better gauge someone's personality than his or her family and friends could.