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Real estate website Zillow soars in IPO debut
Stock Market News |
2011/07/20 09:29
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Shares of real estate website Zillow have more than doubled in their trading debut Wednesday. It's the latest Internet company to climb sharply in its first day of trading following strong openings from jobs networking site LinkedIn, music service Pandora and Russian search engine Yandex -- although Pandora is almost unchanged from its first-day close, and Yandex trades lower than it did on the end of its first day. Zillow, founded in 2004, provides online listings for more than 100 million homes for sale and rent. The portal's "Zestimate" helps estimate property values. Investors are bidding up Zillow Inc. stock, even though the Seattle company has never posted an annual profit. Zillow priced shares for $20 per share late Tuesday, $2 more than the top of the range it had predicted Friday. In midday trading Wednesday, Zillow had risen to $38.80 after trading as high as $60 earlier in the session. That means that the value of the company has dropped from more than $1.6 billion to about $1 billion since trading began. Including a private stock sale of 275,000 shares, Zillow raised $74.7 million. It has no specific plans for the funds, saying only that it will use them for general corporate purposes. The stock is trading under the symbol "Z" on the Nasdaq exchange. |
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Bank of America shares dip below $10
Stock Market News |
2011/07/15 12:19
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Bank of America shares fell below $10 for the first time since May 2009.
The stock price hit a low of $9.88 Friday, making it the only one of the four largest banks with a share price in the single digits. Most large bank stocks fell on Friday on fears of the fallout of the European debt crisis and the results of stress tests on the European banks' ability to withstand economic stress.
Investors have ben bailing out of Bank of America stock for several months, driving the price. In the past 12 months, Bank of America Corp.'s stock has fallen 35 percent, making it the third worst performing stock in the Standard & Poor's 500 index. On Friday, the stock closed at $10, down 0.7 percent for the day.
The stock decline is a setback for the nation's largest bank and its CEO Brian Moynihan, who has had to deal with multiple crises in the last year, mostly related to mortgage problems stemming from the bank's 2008 purchase of Countrywide Financial.
On June 29, Bank of America announced its latest settlement with investors who claim they were knowingly sold poorly written mortgage bonds. At $8.5 billion, it was the largest bank settlement ever announced. The amount eclipsed the last three years of earnings at the Charlotte, N.C. bank.
The stock also reflects investors' anxieties over how deep Bank of America's problems might be, says Cassandra Toroian, president and chief investment officer at Bell Rock Capital. |
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Foreclosure activity slowed in first half of 2011
Stock Market News |
2011/07/13 21:42
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The number of homes taken back by lenders in the first half of this year fell 30 percent compared with the same 2010 period, the result of delays in foreclosure processing that threaten to stall a U.S. housing recovery.
Banks seized 421,212 homes in the first six months of the year, down from 529,633 between January and June last year, foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday.
The decline reflects lenders taking longer to move against homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments. The banks are working through foreclosure documentation problems that first surfaced last fall and an ensuing logjam in some state courts. Lenders also have put off on taking action against delinquent borrowers as U.S. home sales have slowed this year.
As the processing delays mount, however, so has the backlog of potential foreclosures -- homes that otherwise would have been repossessed by lenders this year.
RealtyTrac estimates that 1 million foreclosure-related notices that should have been filed by banks this year will be pushed to next year. The filings include notices for defaults, scheduled home auctions and home repossessions -- warnings that can lead to a home eventually being lost to foreclosure.
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Netflix price hike angers users, some drop plan
Stock Market News |
2011/07/13 11:43
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Some Netflix customers called it a slap in the face. Others a betrayal. Many threatened to drop the movie service.
On Wednesday, many of them vented on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, seething over Netflix Inc.'s decision to raise its prices by up to 60 percent for the millions of subscribers who want to rent DVDs by mail and watch movies online.
"I can definitely afford it but I dropped them on principle," said Joe Turick, a technology engineer in Monroe, N.C., who has been with Netflix for about a decade, cancelled his subscription within an hour of learning of Tuesday's price changes and plans to try competitors.
By Wednesday afternoon, more than 40,000 people had responded to a post on Netflix's Facebook page announcing the change, with some saying they would switch to rivals such as Hulu.com's paid service and to Redbox's DVD-rental kiosks.
Outrage bubbled on Twitter, and on Netflix's blog a posting about the new plans had garnered 5,000 comments -- the limit allowed by the site's host, Google Inc.-owned Blogger -- which included many seething customers.
Netflix said company executives expected the intense reaction.
"Everything Netflix does is with extensive research and testing and analysis, so we expected some people to be disappointed," spokesman Steve Swasey said.
While thousands complained on Facebook, Twitter and other websites, with 22.8 million customers in the U.S., it's clear that plenty of them are not upset about the change.
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Moody's downgrades Portugal on fear of 2nd bailout
Stock Market News |
2011/07/05 12:23
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Ratings agency Moody's downgraded Portugal's government debt on Tuesday, citing growing risks the country will require a second rescue package because it cannot meet its debt reduction targets.
Moody's Investors Service cut its rating by one notch to Baa2 from Baa1 and said in a report that it was increasingly unlikely that Portugal would be able to borrow money on capital markets in 2013, as planned.
As a result, it said the country would probably require more financial aid -- on top of the euro78 billion ($113 billion) bailout it received earlier this year -- with private banks taking some losses.
The Portuguese government said in response that it is fully committed to meeting debt reduction targets and economic reforms tied to the bailout.
Portugal has been shut out of bond markets for long-term loans since April, when its government collapsed, heightening investors' concerns about its financial future.
Moody's said the European Union's insistence on involving private sector holders of Greek debt in a second bailout for the country indicates the same would happen for Portugal.
The agency's report is a blow to Portugal as it tries to distance itself from Greece, which has had to redouble painful austerity measures because it did not meet debt reduction targets.
Moody's said Portugal faces huge challenges in reducing spending and tax evasion, achieving economic growth and supporting the banking system and did not exclude another rating cut.
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Investment Fraud Litigation |
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Securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud, is a practice that induces investors to make purchase or sale decisions on the basis of false information, frequently resulting in losses, in violation of the securities laws. Securities Arbitration. Generally speaking, securities fraud consists of deceptive practices in the stock and commodity markets, and occurs when investors are enticed to part with their money based on untrue statements.
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