It's earnings season, and a hail of hostile fire seems to be raining on the stock market. We had the General Electric disaster on Friday. Then Wachovia followed on Monday with big write-offs and a dividend cut. But a new strategic factor has also entered the picture.

Despite those two major shocks, the Standard & Poor's 500 index refused to collapse yesterday and actually squeezed out a decent gain today. I won't say the market has become impervious to bad news, but investors are shaking off the disappointments more quickly now than they did two or three months ago.

We're dodging bullets, instead of taking them in the back. That's a very encouraging development -- quite in character for the early stages of a recovery after a bear market.

Typically, for a number of weeks after a long market slide ends, negative news continues to bombard Wall Street. But investors begin to see bits and pieces of countervailing evidence that points to better times ahead.

What positives are the buyers spotting these days? Besides dramatically lower money market rates (which ease debt burdens and make it more and more unappealing for investors to hold cash), a few bellwether companies are signaling that they're doing OK even in this tough environment, thank you.

Tonight after the close, for example, semiconductor giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) met its Q1 earnings forecast and spoke of "a strengthening core business and a solid global environment." The company also raised its guidance for the second quarter.

It will take many more such announcements, of course, to push stock prices appreciably higher. But a journey of a thousand miles doesn't begin until you open the garage door.