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Wall Street benchmarks flat, attention focussed on corporate earnings

Last updated: 10:45 20 Oct 2015 EDT, First published: 05:45 20 Oct 2015 EDT

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Wall Street was mostly flat in early deals on Tuesday, with corporate earnings for the third quarter being the main focus for investors.

The Dow Jones climbed around 30 points, 0.16%, to 17,258 while the S&P 500 added 4.5 points, 0.22%, to 2,038 and the Nasdaq was dead even at 4,905.

Whilst benchmarks were middle of the road, today's financial results were very much in different lanes.

The likes of IBM (NYSE:IBM), Harley Davidson (NYSE:HOG) and Regions Financial (NYSE:RF) all fell short of market expectations, whereas Verizon (NYSE:VZ), Travelers (NYSE:TRV), United Technologies (NYSE:UTX) and Six Flags (NYSE:SIX) did better than Wall Street expected.

Fast-food franchiser YUM Brands (NYSE:YUM) advanced over 4% after the KFC and Pizza Hut parent  revealed plans to spin-out its Chinese arm.

United Continental Holdings (NYSE:UAL), the owner of United Airlines, was down 1% this morning after confirming executive vice president and general counsel Brett Hart as acting chief executive in the place of Oscar Munoz, who suffered a heart attack earlier this month.

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), up 1.6% at US$113.51, said it had signed up over 6.5mln subscribers to its music streaming service and a further 8.5mln users were currently using it via a three month free trial period.

Memory maker SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) was up over 5% amid bid speculation with Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) in the frame as a possible buyer, according to reports, which claim WD is in advanced talks.

Elsewhere, the day’s other takeover story involved physician services outsourcer AmSurg Corp (NASDAQ:AMSG) which is said to be seeking a merger with TeamHealth Holdings (NYSE:TMH).

The former is down 4.3% to US$74,70 per share, whereas the latter rose nearly 18% to trade at US$61.66.

Later this afternoon, after the closing bell, the attention will be on Chipolte (NYSE:CMG) and Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) as both will be releasing third quarter earnings reports.

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