By Caroline Valetkevitch 14 minutes ago
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks gained on Tuesday as record oil prices lifted shares of oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N), while investors scoured for bargains among beaten-down bank shares after Monday's sell-off of financials.
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) rose 3.3 percent to $44.16.
Also, Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) repeated that market rumors that it may have to write down mortgage-related losses are "still untrue." The S&P financial index (.GSPF) was up 0.7 percent, while Goldman was up 1 percent at $220.40
Crude oil futures briefly rose more than $3 to a record high $97 a barrel on a weaker dollar and supply concerns. Exxon Mobil gained 2.9 percent to $90.18, leading advancers in both the blue-chip Dow average and the S&P.
"My feeling yesterday was that the bad credit market news reached a crescendo," said Al Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards in St. Louis.
"How much worse can the news get? I think it's back to people beginning to realize the financials are deeply oversold and the economy is going OK."
The Dow Jones industrial average (.DJI) was up 43.00 points, or 0.32 percent, at 13,586.40. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index (.SPX) was up 7.63 points, or 0.51 percent, at 1,509.80. The Nasdaq Composite Index (.IXIC) was up 8.76 points, or 0.31 percent, at 2,803.94.
Web search company Google Inc (GOOG.O), whose price target was raised to $850 by broker research firm Sanford C. Bernstein, was up 1.4 percent at $736.03 on Nasdaq.
Shares of Research In Motion Ltd (RIM.TO) (RIMM.O) gained 1.9 percent to $130.45 after Credit Suisse raised its rating on the stock.