New York - US stocks managed gains in opening trade on Tuesday despite significant first-quarter earnings disappointments from blue chips Goldman Sachs and IBM and a poor forecast from Netflix.
About five minutes into trade, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 18 039.46, up 35.30 points.
The broad-based S&P 500 rose 0.24% to 2 099.47, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index was down by a bare 0.01% at 4 959.46.
Supporting the Dow was a strong quarterly earnings report by UnitedHealth Group, which handily beat earnings forecasts helped by a 24.5% surge in revenues to $44.5bn.