Anxious investors await release of results

NEXT week's flood of corporate earnings may offer the ailing US stock market some relief, if not a cure, after a brutal sell-off that drove stocks to their lowest levels in nearly five years.

Investors, unnerved by months of virtually relentless declines, are searching for any signs that the bear market is ready to head back into hibernation.

The earnings season is set to heat up in what will be one of the busiest weeks of the second-quarter reporting period, with about two-thirds of the companies in the Standard & Poors 500 index set to issue results over the next two weeks.

Half of the 30 companies in the blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average are scheduled to release results.

Results are on tap from marquee technology names like computer giant International Business Machines and top computer chip-maker Intel Corp., as well as financial services firms like Merrill Lynch and CitiGroup.

Blue chips and the broad market suffered their worst weekly drop this week since they crumbled in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the US, slammed by real as well as rumoured accounting scams.

On Wednesday, the broad Standard & Poors 500 index and the Nasdaq Composite Index slammed to their lowest levels since 1997 after Qwest Communications Inc. revealed it was the target of a Federal probe.

For the week, the S&P 500 dropped 6.8% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 7.4%, their largest drops since late September.

The Nasdaq racked up its worst week since April 2002, with a loss of 5.2%.

Skittish investors pulled a net $3.3 billion out of US-stock mutual funds, investing domestically in the week ended July 10, capping a sixth week of net withdrawals, according to AMG Data Services.

Foreign purchases of US securities, including stocks and bonds, dropped 56% to $93.3 billion in the first quarter from $166.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2001, the Securities Industry Association said.