NEW YORK - Stocks regained some ground Wednesday as many investors, though still uneasy about the economy, decided to buy back into a market battered a day earlier by recession worries. The Dow Jones industrials rose more than 100 points after falling 370 on Tuesday.

Better-than-expected profit results from Walt Disney Co. handed Wall Street some good news. Disney posted a 26 percent decline in profit late Tuesday, but the results beat expectations. The company — one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones industrials — reported a 9 percent rise in revenue, thanks in part to the success of brands such as ESPN, "High School Musical" and "Hannah Montana."

Disney shares rose more than 5 percent.

Investors also received some positive economic data Wednesday — fourth-quarter productivity climbed by 1.8 percent and labor costs rose by a fairly low 2.1 percent. The results were worse than they were in the third quarter, when productivity shot up 6 percent and costs fell by 1.9 percent, but better than economists predicted.

The report alleviated some of Wall Street's anxiety about the shaky economy, at least for the time being. The stock market had plummeted Tuesday, giving the Dow on its biggest percentage drop since Feb. 27, 2007, after the Institute for Supply Management reported a surprising January contraction in the U.S. service sector — news that bolstered the argument that the nation is in recession.

"The market got a bit oversold. It was just one number — the market was acting viscerally," said Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors, noting that low trading volumes may have exaggerated the drop Tuesday. "There's no smoking gun here; there's one bad number, one good number .... We're probably going to chop around here until investors get a better feel on this recession-or-no-recession question."

The Dow rose 101.12, or 0.82 percent, to 12,366.25, after slipped into negative territory briefly during early trading.

Broader stock indicators also rose after some fluctuation. The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 12.72, or 0.95 percent, to 1,349.36, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 24.15, or 1.05 percent, to 2,333.72.

Government bond prices declined as investors gave stocks another try. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, rose to 3.62 percent from 3.56 percent late Tuesday.

In other earnings, Time Warner Inc. posted a profit decline in its fourth quarter. But excluding the effect of a year-ago gain from the sale of AOL's online access business in Europe, profit rose due to better results at the media conglomerate's cable TV and movie operations. Time Warner rose 15 cents to $15.55.

Toll Brothers Inc. said revenues fell 22 percent during its fiscal first quarter, and that is not "seeing much light at the end of the tunnel." Toll fell 42 cents, or 2 percent, to $21.45.

And late Tuesday, the fiscal second-quarter earnings of JDS Uniphase Corp., which makes communications test and fiber-optic network equipment, fell slightly year-over-year but widely surpassed Wall Street estimates. JDS Uniphase shot up $2.76, or 27 percent, to $12.92.

Though politics are not a priority on Wall Street right now, they could soon come into play. Investors have been trying to determine who the presidential nominees will be, and while Republican John McCain and Democrat Hillary Clinton are leading the delegate counts after Tuesday's primaries, nothing is certain yet.

The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices rose.
Light, sweet crude oil dropped $1.10 to $87.31 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 7.68, or 1.09 percent, to 709.26.

Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by about 2 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 429.9 million shares.

Overseas stocks were mixed. Japan's Nikkei stock average dropped 4.7 percent and Hong Kong's Hang Seng index fell 5.4 percent. In Europe, Britain's FTSE 100 slipped 0.15 percent, Germany's DAX index rose 0.72 percent, and France's CAC-40 rose 0.69 percent.

Source: Associated Press