Stocks bounced back last week in a powerful upswing that saw the Standard & Poor’s 500 index soar 4.1%. The rise erased the deep losses of the previous week and then some. Equity markets around the world joined in the rally, up about 2%.

“Investors were buoyed by a combination of sentiment improving on better global economic figures and solid U.S. third-quarter earnings results,” says Yousef Abbasi, a market strategist at JonesTrading.

In particular, the market was bolstered by profit reports from some of the biggest industrial names, continued good U.S. macroeconomic numbers, and better-than-expected—if still unimpressive—euro-zone and Chinese data.

The strong earnings news—from the likes of Caterpillar (ticker: CAT), 3M (MMM), Microsoft (MSFT), and General Motors (GM)—came later in the week and seemed to expunge the memory of the poor showings. The latter, for example, came from equally large mega-cap companies such as International Business Machines (IBM), Amazon (AMZN), AT&T (T), McDonald’s (MCD), and Coca-Cola (KO).

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is filled with many of the above-named stocks, didn’t do as well as the S&P. It rose 425 points or 2.6% to 16,805.41. The S&P 500 index gained 78 to 1964.58. The Nasdaq Composite index added 225, or 5.3% to 4483.72, while the Russell 2000 picked up 3.4% to 1118.82.

(Source: Barrons Online)