Welcome to the DC Today, your daily market synopsis of the Dividing Cafe, brought to you every Monday through Thursday to bring you up-to-date information and perspective on financial markets.

Hello and welcome to the Thursday edition of DC Today. What a difference.

24 hours makes we had a substantial rally in the markets today. And I'm going to talk to you about four different reasons and

four different, not so much reasons, but stories behind market activity today.

The Dow was up 524 points, which is over 1.5%.

S&P was up about 2%.

The NASDAQ was up about 2.4.

So you got that staggered risk on total return on the day.

Let's start with by far the biggest mover of markets is earnings. Even after hours today, some of the results that were coming out were very

positive and you're seeing some pre-market boosts. Some other results came out were not as positive.

You saw some drops pre-market,

but as earnings go, so goes the market. That's always true through time. But those are expecting

this to be a period in which tighter margins and downward pressure on revenue growth kicked

into a tougher earnings environment. We're getting far enough along to start saying,

okay, it looks like that day of reckoning has been delayed yet again.

Earnings results coming in better expected.

And particularly the largest social media company in the world was up huge with,

which brought the whole communication services sector up behind improved earnings results.

Communication services wasn't the whole story, though.

All 11 sectors in the market were up today.

The last place sector today was energy, which was up half a percent.

Communication, I told you was number one.

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