YAHOO[BRIEFING.COM]: Following a sluggish start, stocks put together an impressive performance in which the S&P 500 advanced more than 4%, providing participants with a solid follow through from Tuesday's 6.4% rebound.

This session's positive tone was inspired by better-than-expected retail sales data, renewed buying interest in bellwether General Electric, and more encouraging news from the financial sector.

Better-than-expected retail sales data suggested consumers haven't completely rolled over. February retail sales declined just 0.1%, which is better than the 0.5% decline that was expected. Excluding autos, retail sales increased 0.7%. A decline of 0.1% was expected. Meanwhile, January total sales and sales less autos were revised to show an even larger increase.

The upbeat retail sales data comes in the face of ongoing consumer headwinds, such as mounting job losses. Weekly initial claims climbed 9,000 to 654,000, which was worse than expected. Continuing claims jumped nearly 200,000 to 5.32 million, which was also worse than expected.

In other economic news, February business inventories declined 1.1%, which is essentially in-line with the consensus estimate.

Participants had little in the way of corporate headlines to digest until Standard & Poor's disclosed they lowered General Electric's (GE 9.57, +1.08) credit rating one notch to AA+ from AAA. However, the downgrade became widely expected, so investors already priced in the bad news by sending shares to multiyear lows in recent weeks. That allowed shares to rebound once the bad news was released.

Financial stocks took their cues from GE. Financials had been down more than 2% in the early going, but rallied to close with a 10% gain. Bank of America (BAC 5.85, +0.92) was a primary leader among financials. According to Dow Jones, the company stated it was profitable in the first two months of the year and the company doesn't believe it will need more government capital.

Financial stocks were also helped by hope a congressional subcommittee will suspend mark-to-market accounting rules, though no definitive statements have been made from the committee's meeting.

Stocks closed at session highs, capping three straight sessions of gains. During that time stocks have advanced nearly 11%. That is the best three-session performance since stocks rallied from their November lows, which where stocks are now trading.DJ30 +239.66 NASDAQ +54.46 SP500 +29.38 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 2210/2.15 bln/495 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 2839/1.81 bln/261