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Nov 1 (Reuters) -

Wall Street's major indexes kept their gains on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged as was widely expected while acknowledging the economy's strength.

The Fed

held rates

steady but left the door open to a further increases in a policy statement that acknowledged the U.S. economy's surprising strength, but nodded to tighter financial conditions faced by businesses and consumers.

"The Fed left rates unchanged, as expected and made some minor adjustments to the statement, but nothing dramatic," said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Independent Advisor Alliance, Charlotte, NC noting that investors would now turn their focus to Fed Chair Jerome Powell's press conference, which kicks off a 2:30 p.m EDT

(1830 GMT)

"Investors will be listening very closely to Powell's words. People will be trying to parse it. Is the bias toward tightening or is the bias toward easing? I think everyone's going to try to slice and dice his words to try to figure out is the next meeting a live meeting."

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 43.69 points, or 0.13%, to 33,096.56, the S&P 500 gained 12.23 points, or 0.29%, to 4,206.03 and the Nasdaq Composite added 67.42 points, or 0.52%, to 12,918.66.

Earlier the stock market got a boost from falling bond yields after the U.S. Treasury Department said it will slow the pace of increases in its longer-dated debt auctions in the November-January quarter and expects it will need one more additional quarter of increases after this to meet its financing needs.

Earnings has been a mixed bag for stocks even though 79.7% of the 310 S&P 500 companies that had reported at the time of LSEG's latest update, had beat analyst expectations for the quarter while only 16.1% had fallen short of estimates.

Still investors were disappointed by many quarterly updates.

CVS Health

beat estimates for quarterly profit, though its shares fell as medical costs at its health insurance business were high.

Estee Lauder

shares tumbled after the beauty products maker cut its annual profit outlook. And shares in Payroll processor Paycom Software sank after it projected for downbeat fourth-quarter revenue.

Tinder owner Match Group fell after it also forecast fourth-quarter revenue below estimates.

Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 1.38-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.38-to-1 ratio favored decliners.

The S&P 500 posted 7 new 52-week highs and 28 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 20 new highs and 259 new lows.

(Reporting by Amruta Khandekar and Shashwat Chauhan in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila, Dhanya Ann Thoppil and Maju Samuel)