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$STM Said to Be Looking to Raise $500 Million for Restructuring Purposes

STMicroelectronics NV (STM)Intel Corp. (INTC)’s largest competitor in Europe, will spend as much as $500 million to exit its unprofitable wireless-chip venture with Ericsson AB (ERICB), as demand starts to recover in other segments.

The semiconductor manufacturer, based in Geneva, is finalizing plans to pull out of ST-Ericsson by the third quarter. Shutting down the venture is one of the options being considered, Stockholm-based Ericsson has said…”

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$RIO Will Temporarily Suspend a Mining Project in Mongolia to Discuss Countries Want of Share

Rio Tinto Group (RIO), the second-biggest mining company, is considering a temporary halt to construction work at its $6.2 billion Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold project in Mongolia as the government demands a greater share of profit from the mine, according to two people familiar with the plans.

The London-based company is discussing the suspension to protest the central Asian nation’s demands for a bigger stake in the project and new mining royalty rates, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to comment publicly. A suspension of work, which may halt mining and processing, isn’t certain and is among options that managers are discussing in London, one of the people said….”

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Will $FB Destroy $OPEN and $YELP ?

“Instagram snaps of the delicious meal you’re about to eat are such a cliché, they played a starring role in CollegeHumor’s hilarious takedown of the Facebook-owned photo-sharing site.

But for restaurateurs, these pics are no joke: People are taking a massive number of photos of food, and Instagram’s Photo Map feature instantly shows what’s being served at a restaurant. That was the rationale behind OpenTable’s $10 million acquisition of Foodspotting this week.

New numbers reported by MomentFeed, a startup that helps brands manage location pages on services like Facebook and Foursquare, show what a huge phenomenon this is.

It’s not limited to fancy, upscale restaurants in San Francisco and New York; people are taking huge numbers of photos in chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory and PF Chang’s.

In an 18-day period studied at the end of 2012, users posted 4,899 photos tagged with a Cheesecake Factory location on Instagram. (MomentFeed only analyzed place-tagged photos, not comments or hashtags.)

Those numbers destroy what’s happening on Foodspotting, a service dedicated to this particular art form. Instagram had 40 times the number of photos taken at Chevy’s locations versus Foodspotting. At Texas Roadhouse, the ratio was 22 times. And those numbers are typical for most chain restaurants.

Yelp has long offered the ability to upload photos alongside reviews. But a spotcheck of the Cheesecake Factory location in downtown San Francisco, a Yelp stronghold, shows 564 photos posted over the past six years. The pace of posting has picked up recently, boosted by Yelp’s mobile app. Our rough estimate shows Instagram users posting two to three times more frequently at Cheesecake Factory locations.

“It’s obvious Instagram is the real Foodspotting,” MomentFeed CEO Rob Reed told Business Insider. “That’s why Foodspotting stalled and were acquired. Vertically focused apps don’t make it.”

We don’t think OpenTable bought Foodspotting for its photo database, of course—it’s more about bringing mobile and social talent into the company and setting them loose on OpenTable’s larger user base. But even then, Instagram has such a huge head start on food photos, we’re not sure how OpenTable will ever catch up.

What’s the implication for Facebook? Huge, if it can tie the photos together with Graph Search and location pages.

While Graph Search is currently limited, one thing it can do right now is show all the photos taken at a particular location….”
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$JPM Bet Against Itself In London ‘Whale’ Trading Scandal

“* Investment bank bet against CIO in derivatives market

* Bank said to have discussed merging opposing trade books

* Opposing bets could fuel claim JPM is too big to manage

By Emily Flitter

NEW YORK, Jan 29 (Reuters) – There is a new twist in the London Whale trading scandal that cost JPMorgan Chase $6.2 billion in trading losses last year. Some of the firm’s own traders bet against the very derivatives positions placed by its chief investment office, said three people familiar with the matter.

The U.S. Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, which launched an inquiry into the trading loss last fall, is looking into the how different divisions of the bank wound up on opposite sides of the same trade, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

The committee is expected to release a report on its investigation in the next few weeks.

The people familiar with the situation did not comment on the dollar value of the opposing trades placed by JPMorgan Chase & Co’s investment bank traders, which was much smaller than the total positions put on by the CIO.

The intra-bank trading was not mentioned in a 129-page report JPMorgan released on Jan. 16, which chronicled some of the bank’s risk management failures. The scandal has led to a number of management changes at JPMorgan and has sullied CEO Jamie Dimon’s image as a hands-on risk manager.

Kristin Lemkau, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, declined to comment on the investment bank’s trading positions.

A spokeswoman for the Senate committee, led by Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat, declined to comment on its investigation.

It was widely known that a group of about eight credit-focused hedge funds, such as BlueMountain Capital Management and Saba Capital Management, were on the other side of the trades that JPMorgan’s London-based Whale team made on an index tied to corporate default rates. But the role JPMorgan’s own investment bank may have played in the messy unwinding of the derivatives trade has not come out until now….”

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Insiders Cash Out of $FIVE on a Secondary Offering

Five Below Inc. (NASDAQ: FIVE) has enjoyed a rather good run since its 2012 initial public offering. The company sells products that cost under $5 and are supposed to be targeted towards children. Now we have a secondary offering from the company, and investors should know that this offering is the insiders cashing out.

 

The secondary offering was raised in size due to demand, up to 11.315 million shares at $35.65 per share. This was projected to be 10.315 million shares to be sold just last week. The underwriters were listed as Goldman Sachs, Barclays Capital, Jefferies & Company, Credit Suisse Securities, Deutsche Bank Securities, UBS Securities and Wells Fargo Securities. Certain selling shareholders have granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase an additional 1,697,250 shares of common stock.

Here is all that investors need to know on the surface: All of the shares are being offered by selling shareholders, including certain members of Five Below’s management team and affiliates of certain members of Five Below’s board of directors. Five Below will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares in this offering.

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Michael $DELL Will Contribute $1 Billion of His Own Funds To Take a Majority Stake in Going Private

“Michael Dell is trying to get control of Dell, Inc. with as much as $1 billion of his own personal funds. His goal: shift the company’s focus from PC sales to a more enterprise-focused company that can operate without the pressures of being publicly traded.

According to Bloomberg, Dell, who now owns 15.7 percent of the company, may contribute between $500 million to $1 billion to the buyout led by Silver Lake Management with potential support from Microsoft Corp. With the personal investment, Dell’s value in the company would be $3.45 billion….”

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$MSFT Announces GIT Support for Visual Studio

“Microsoft just made a major announcementthat will likely take many developers by surprise. At the ALM Summit in Redmond, WA this morning, Microsoft Brian Harry just announced that its Team Foundation Server and hosted Team Foundation Service (TFS), as well as the complete Visual Studio 2012 suite (through a plugin the company is releasing today) will offer support for Git, the increasingly popular distributed revision control and source code management system invented by Linux founder Linus Torvalds.

This is obviously one of the rarer moments where Microsoft embraces an open source solution that already has a lot of momentum behind it…”

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Gapping Up and Down This Morning

NYSE

GAINERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
LND.N 5.05 +0.21 +4.34
PBF.N 33.00 +1.11 +3.48
SSTK.N 25.29 +0.82 +3.35
RIOM.N 5.35 +0.12 +2.29
ACT.N 85.84 +1.58 +1.88

LOSERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
RKUS.N 23.49 -0.66 -2.73
CORR.N 6.83 -0.14 -2.01
PBYI.N 24.65 -0.47 -1.87
WWAV.N 16.14 -0.19 -1.16
WDAY.N 55.93 -0.57 -1.01

NASDAQ

GAINERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
MLNK.OQ 3.08 +0.89 +40.64
KERX.OQ 8.36 +2.30 +37.95
SOMH.OQ 11.60 +2.47 +27.05
OSBC.OQ 2.08 +0.39 +23.08
VTUS.OQ 3.28 +0.55 +20.15

LOSERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
GFNCL.OQ 7.50 -4.48 -37.40
SANM.OQ 9.20 -2.55 -21.70
ANAC.OQ 4.11 -1.06 -20.50
HTCH.OQ 2.29 -0.44 -16.12
JAXB.OQ 2.23 -0.42 -15.85

AMEX

GAINERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
SVLC.A 2.60 +0.16 +6.56
SAND.A 11.71 +0.18 +1.56
BXE.A 4.96 +0.07 +1.43
WVT.A 11.62 +0.09 +0.78

LOSERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
FU.A 3.35 -0.10 -2.90
EOX.A 6.09 -0.16 -2.56
CTF.A 23.00 -0.29 -1.27
REED.A 5.41 -0.01 -0.18

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The Difference Between $TSLA & $BA in Battery Design

 

“Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk says the batteries that have burst into flame on Boeing’s new Dreamliners are “fundamentally unsafe.”

Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, specifically designed its batteries to prevent this problem.

In an email to the aviation publication Flightglobal, Musk said the following:

“Unfortunately, the pack architecture supplied to Boeing is inherently unsafe. Large cells without enough space between them to isolate against the cell-to-cell thermal domino effect means it is simply a matter of time before there are more incidents of this nature.”

Flightglobal’s Zach Rosenberg explains this in more detail:

Both Boeing and Tesla use batteries fueled by lithium cobalt oxide, which is among the most energy-dense and flammable chemistries of lithium-ion batteries on the market. While Boeing elected to use a battery with a grouping of eight large cells, Tesla’s batteries contain thousands of smaller cells that are independently separated to prevent fire in a single cell from harming the surrounding ones.

“Moreover, when thermal runaway occurs with a big cell, a proportionately larger amount of energy is released and it is very difficult to prevent that energy from then heating up the neighboring cells and causing a domino effect that results in the entire pack catching fire,” says Musk.

“They [Boeing]…”

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$TM To Recall 1 Million Vehicles for Airbag Issues

 

“TOKYO (Reuters) – Toyota Motor Corp will recall nearly 1.3 million cars globally for two separate defects, including 752,000 Corolla and Corolla Matrix vehicles in the United States to fix airbags that could be deployed inadvertently, the automaker said on Wednesday.

It is the third Toyota recall since October to involve more than a million cars, and it comes as the company tries to recover from a damaged reputation following a series of recalls between 2009 and 2011 that were related to unintended acceleration problems.

An IC chip in the airbag control unit can malfunction when it receives electrical interference from other parts in the car, causing the airbags to deploy when it is not necessary, Toyota spokesman Naoto Fuse said.

Toyota is also recalling certain Corolla and Corolla Matrix vehicles in Japan, Canada, and Mexico.

The problem has caused minor injuries such as abrasions in 18 cases that have been reported, he said. Two accidents have been reported by customers outside Japan, although Toyota has not been able to confirm them, he said.

Toyota will add an electrical signal filter to the airbag control module to the recalled vehicles — repairs expected to take an hour to hour-and-a-half, he said.

The spokesman declined to disclose the costs involved.

LIMITED FINANCIAL IMPACT…”

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Aubrey McClendon Is Stepping Down – $CHK

“Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon will retire effective April 1, according to a company release.

A spokesman says the company is not for sale, according to Bloomberg.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Russell Gold Tweets, McClendon cites unspecified “philosophical differences” with the board as his reason for stepping down in the release.

Shares of CHK are surging in after-hours trading, up more than 10 percent.

Last year, McClendon was the subject of a series of Reuters investigations alleging conflict of interest at the country’s second-largest natural gas producer….”
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Bespoke’s Hickey: Apple Is No ‘Bellwether’

“The fact that the overall stock market has risen convincingly in the face of Apple’s sharp drop raises questions about the predictive power of a stock that was once investors’ darling.

“The company just isn’t the market bellwether,” Paul Hickey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group, tells The New York Times.

Since Jan. 2, Apple shares have plunged 18 percent, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has climbed 3 percent.

Apple also hasn’t correlated much with the overall market when the stock has soared, Hickey says. His data show IBM is the real market leader.

During the last 10 years, on the day after IBM announced earnings, the S&P 500 matched the direction moved by its stock 75 percent of the time.

That represents the highest score for any company in the index, and is twice Apple’s 37.5 percent.

To be sure, Princeton economist Burton Malkiel says the stock market generally doesn’t move in a predictable manner.

“If it did, money managers would be able to beat the market regularly. But the vast majority of them can’t,” he tells The Times.

In any case, not everyone has turned bearish on Apple’s shares….”

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$JCP Pops 6% on Discounted Sales and Kicking $MSO to the Curb

J. C. Penney Company, Inc. (JCP)

-NYSE

20.43 Up 1.21(6.32%) 10:21AM EST – Nasdaq Real Time Price

A dispute between Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. (NYSE: MSO) and Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M) over a licensing deal between Stewart and J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (NYSE: JCP) is set to go to court next month. In the meantime, J.C. Penney’s rollout of its Martha Stewart-branded goods will be crippled by the store’s decision to leave her name off a wide variety of products in its home decor and housewares lines…”

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$FB Updates iOS App With Voice Messages, Video Recording, And Sharing

“Facebook yesterday updated its iOS app to version 5.4, giving users a few new features in what could be one of the world’s most complex and layered mobile apps.

The update brings with it the ability to share voice messages, much like iOS’s Voice Memos, letting users record a cute little message and send it through the app to friends. The update also lets users record and share video from right within the app.

Facebook users have long had the ability to send 60-second voice messages within Facebook’s Messenger app, but the functionality has been brought over to the main app.

Users can send a voice message by tapping the plus button under the Messages tab. From there, click Record and simply hold the button to record your message. When you release, your message will be automatically sent unless you slide your finger off the button, in which case the message will be canceled.

Along with video and voice functionality…”

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$BRK-A Files to Raise Capital

“Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) is about to raise some new debt financing. An SEC filing S-3ASR from Warren Buffett and friends was filed on behalf of the Berkshire Hathaway Finance Corporation unit to be sold as guarantee of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. of debt securities of Berkshire Hathaway Finance Corporation. The formal dollar amount was not shown but that will be out in the coming days. It is not that common for Berkshire Hathaway to be tapping the public bond market, but it is not all that uncommon either.

Berkshire Hathway’s S-3ASR filing said:

We will issue senior debt securities on a senior unsecured basis under an indenture, dated as of February 1, 2010, by and among Berkshire, Berkshire Hathaway Finance Corporation and The Bank of New York Mellon Trust Company, N.A.. BHFC may also issue debt securities under this indenture; however, the debt securities described herein are solely issued by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

As far as the use of proceeds…..”

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Gapping Up and Down This Morning

NYSE

GAINERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
PBF.N 31.89 +1.94 +6.48
WDAY.N 56.50 +2.11 +3.88
GMED.N 13.50 +0.40 +3.05
SRC.N 19.97 +0.44 +2.25
RHP.N 41.11 +0.78 +1.93

LOSERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
PBYI.N 25.12 -1.25 -4.74
TRLA.N 24.27 -1.18 -4.64
ANFI.N 6.35 -0.29 -4.37
HCI.N 22.73 -0.94 -3.97
PES.N 7.59 -0.20 -2.57

NASDAQ

GAINERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
KERX.OQ 6.06 +2.63 +76.68
FURX.OQ 35.34 +14.10 +66.38
SHIP.OQ 2.46 +0.70 +39.77
GFNCL.OQ 11.98 +3.13 +35.37
VTUS.OQ 2.73 +0.52 +23.53

LOSERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
RPRX.OQ 11.11 -7.50 -40.30
JOSB.OQ 39.28 -6.99 -15.11
TRMD.OQ 3.48 -0.51 -12.78
EVAC.OQ 6.59 -0.86 -11.54
PRCP.OQ 7.68 -0.98 -11.32

AMEX

GAINERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
EOX.A 6.25 +0.35 +5.93
WVT.A 11.53 +0.18 +1.59
MHR_pe.A 24.20 +0.25 +1.04
FU.A 3.45 +0.03 +0.88

LOSERS

Symb Last Change Chg %
SVLC.A 2.44 -0.09 -3.56
SAND.A 11.53 -0.38 -3.19
REED.A 5.42 -0.08 -1.45
CTF.A 23.45 -0.10 -0.42
BXE.A 4.89 -0.02 -0.41

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$WMT’s Mexican Unit Documents Show Company Used Governor to Implement Bribery

 

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s (WMT) Mexican unit used a current state governor there to facilitate $156,000 in bribes meant to help open stores, an ex-lawyer for the retailer told company officials in 2005, according to documents released by members of the U.S. Congress.

The payments were negotiated by Graco Ramirez Garrido Abreu, who at the time served as a federal lawmaker for the state of Morelos, a Wal-Mart summary of the accusations stated. It was released Jan. 10 by Democratic Representatives Henry Waxman of California and Elijah Cummings of Maryland, whose staff is investigating the lawyer’s allegations….”

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$CVX Documents Reveal Bribery in Ghostwriting Judgement

” In documents filed with the federal district court in Manhattan this morning, Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) for the first time included evidence of bribery in the $18 billion judgment against the company levied by an Ecuadoran court nearly two years ago. Chevron today presented a declaration from a former Ecuadorian judge who says he and another former judge effectively allowed the plaintiffs’ attorneys to write the 188-page judgement against Chevron in exchange for $500,000…”

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