Wall Street extends its uptrend for another day

NEW YORK - Corporate deals and some solid earnings reports propelled the stock market to its sixth straight gain Tuesday.

Allergan (AGN) surged after Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX) said it had teamed up with activist investor Bill Ackman to make a bid for the Botox maker. Netflix (NFLX) and Harley-Davidson (HOG) rose sharply after reporting earnings that beat analyst's expectations.

Stocks are rebounding from a slump earlier this month when investors dumped high-flying biotechnology and Internet shares. The gains over the past week have been driven by a combination of better economic news and respectable, if not spectacular, earnings reports.

"We were definitely oversold, there's no question about that," said Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist at Federated Investors. "Earnings, by and large, haven't been worse than we thought, and the economic news has actually been a little better."

The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 7.66 points, or 0.4 percent, to close at 1,879.55. The six consecutive gains in the index marks the longest winning streak since September.

The Dow Jones industrial average climbed 65.12 points, or 0.4 percent, to 16,514.37. The Nasdaq composite gained 39.91 points, or 1 percent, to 4,161.46.

Allergan rose the most in the S&P 500, climbing $21.65, or 15.2 percent, to $163.65. Health care stocks rose 1.04 percent, the biggest gain of the 10 sectors that make up the S&P 500 index.

There was also deal news in the health care industry from Europe. Swiss pharmaceutical maker Novartis (NVS) unveiled a series of multibillion-dollar deals with Britain's GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the U.S.'s Eli Lilly (LLY).

The announcements helped drive some speculative buying.

"Whenever there are mergers, people start looking for other potential merger candidates," said John Carey, a portfolio manager at Pioneer Investments. "So it usually drives some other stocks up."

Overall, first-quarter earnings at S&P 500 companies are expected to fall 0.8 percent compared with the same period a year earlier and growth of almost 8 percent in the fourth quarter, according to S&P Capital IQ data.